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Artist......: Clactonian
Album.......: Dea Madre
Year........: 2024
Genre.......: Black Metal
Type........: Demo
Label.......: Independent
Language....: English
Source......: WEB/FLAC (24bit)
Quality.....: 1591kbps / 44.1 kHz / Stereo
Tracks......: 4 tracks
Playtime....: 00:12:14
Size........: 138.9 MiB
R.Date......: 2026-06-29
S.Date......: 2024-07-12
Url.........: https://open.qobuz.com/album/mtn8c62mylmgb
01. Bone Ritual 2:41
02. Dea Madre 3:25
03. White Thunder 4:31
04. Lamb (Von cover) 1:36
Forged out of the dark visions of a few like-minded
folks from both Finland and Italy comes Clactonian. A
band that took their name from an old industry of
crafting and using flint tools by some ancestors of
Neanderthals some 400.000 years ago. Combine this
knowledge to the black/white/red aesthetics of the cover
art and you know where to file Clactonian under.
In just over 12 minutes the band cracks your skull with
four tracks of unpolished and barbaric sounding caveman
Black/Death Metal, right in the style of Archgoat,
Beherit, Proclamation and Von - as closer we also get a
cover of the latter. However, it would be a little too
easy to dismiss the band as just a mirror image of the
genre's icons. Although the genre, with its rather
narrowly defined boundaries, does not necessarily offer
very many starting points for a sound of your own,
Clactonian succeeds to a reasonable extent. The main
difference lies in a generally "tidier" sound that this
international ensemble puts forth, it's not nearly as
chaotic and it certainly doesn't sound as dirty either.
Archgoat may indeed be the most obvious comparison, but
Clactonian has not served itself with an equally heavy
and grinding sound.
Now, that slightly more structured nature does not mean
that we are not dealing with a solid demo, because 'Dea
Madre' most certainly is. Clactonian might indeed have
been inspired by those musical ancestors, they have just
poured their take on the genre into a somewhat different
mould. This way they have a more Death Metal oriented
sound, which suits the tracks pretty well. The same
applies to the guitar leads, they are way less frantic
and do not compare to the majority of the bands in this
genre that use those screaming whammy sort of leads. All
used elements and the way they are executed fit
creditably into the band's chosen frame.
You could argue that Clactonian is indeed a more refined
version of the bands that they have taken as their
musical examples and subsequently not as pre-Neanderthal
as you might have expected, but it is up to the
listeners what to think of that. To me it works pretty
fine and 'Dea Madre' is a promising, solid start for the
band.