Review by Greg on September 26, 2024.

Now for something a bit different, a fairly obscure Finnish band from the thrash days of old. In a peculiar landscape of well-concealed and technical hard workers living, like many others, under the enormous shadows of Stone, Tetragon probably weren't its weirdest members (I'd bestow that honor to Flounder), but they no doubt deserved more recognition as well. Unlike many others, they at least seem to be still around, even if in a different form. But that's a story for another day. In their original run, they released a streak of 4-5 demos which aren't terribly easy to find (nor even possible, in some cases), and 1989's intriguingly titled The Shrouds of Falstaff marked their absolute beginning. Let's hear how this turned out.

After the title track, no more than an apocalyptic spoken intro, a typical demo production welcomes us, with admittedly overloud drums that are the release's main propelling force, despite a little sloppiness found especially in the irregular blast beats that make 'For the Jackal's Sake' appear more like a youthful indiscretion of a band which was already skilled, but not always tastefully so. Even then, this is pretty intense stuff, occasionally bordering on death metal territory like at 2:30. Vocals are a half-clean shout which appears as an unrefined version of Bruce Corbitt, or maybe Ingo's work on Schizo's cult debut Main Frame Collapse. Luckily, this demo gets better as the tracks go by. 'Silent Ones' and 'Mold & Slobber' sound less jagged and more focused, still delivering nicely executed death/thrash of the earliest kind, and 'Amok' marks a late highlight with its simply sinister intro (with clean arpeggios to boot) and the always on point riffing.

Unfortunately, every copy I've come across around the 'net appears to be missing the last track, 'Alliterations of Doom', so we'll possibly never know if The Shrouds of Falstaff included even some sort of 'epic' finale, but unless you're pretty much terrorized by demos, this one is well worth a listen.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10