The vocalist of this particular Gauntlet was Craig Sielski, one of the more colorful and loudmouthed characters from the golden age of the old FMP forum. Never directly interacted with him there. I remember him being ridiculed a lot (often deservedly so), but I mostly found him entertaining. By the way, just by making this post, I fully expect some sort of combative message or comment from him, which I'll likely just ignore in lieu of listening to Torment in Fire. Anyway, I remember Gauntlet being mentioned on the boards, but never bothered to check them out.
To be fair, it's not the 3rd rate war metal I was expecting. It's also definitely not the "black thrash" or "almost 80's style Blackened Trash" that Metal-Archives and some mailorders oddly describe it as. I'd call it black/death with no thrash influence of note. It's somewhat chaotic at times, acceptable for demo level stuff but overall not all that good. The extremely buzzy guitars often give it a lo-fi BM sound that doesn't always complement the music, and the main vocals have an off-putting overly forced raspiness (it also sounds like there's some sort of distortion effect on the back end). They're serviceable, but I would have rather heard the brief guttural secondary vocals as the main style. There are also some absolutely ridiculous high vocals that come out in a few brief spots (based on the songtitles, I assume these may be attempts at emulating a screaming female victim?).
The Gauntlet side really only has two things going for it. A couple of the more primitive riffs have a fleeting old school extreme metal feel. Sadly, it's not consistent and any cool riffage is often overtaken by the more prominent BM elements. Then there's the obvious highlight of the entire CD, the Slaughter cover. It's from an earlier demo and sounds way better than the other Gauntlet tracks. Compared to Usurper's more polished version of "Tales of the Macabre," the vocals are far truer to the original (the scream is awful though), and there's a level of untightness that feels more faithful to the spirit of Strappado. The Gauntlet cover does get pretty sloppy during the fast part at the end, though.
The second band, Contagion Black, is actually the same guy who handles all the instrumentation on the Gauntlet tracks. The guitar buzz and production values are similar to the first half of the disc, although they fit Contagion Black's more straightforward black metal style a lot better. "Graveside" started out at a slower, almost doomy tempo that initially impressed me, but unfortunately ended after a minute. The vocals and overall execution of the material are much better than on the Gauntlet side, but the music is rarely above average, and there's nothing here to justify two 9+ min. tracks. The slower/mid-paced sections are generally decent and there's some early Burzum-inspired guitarwork at the end of "Death Doth Ride," but for the amount of material here, they represent very little reward.
So ultimately, I think of this as spending 99 cents for a reasonably good "Tales of the Macabre" cover, which doesn't seem like that bad of a bargain bin deal.
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