Tag Archives: Vastum

Vastum – Hole Below

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Vastum’s second album Patricidal Lust (20 Buck Spin) made quite an impact when it was released in 2013, offering Death Metal fans who weren’t convinced by the Portal-inspired trend towards abstract dissonance a more conventional but equally engaging alternative. It also made waves due to Vastum’s unorthodox use of sex and relationships as lyrical content, though it has to be said that they address those topics in a straight-forwardly Death Metal way – when their new album opens with a track called ‘Sodomitic Malevolence’, you know we’re talking World’s Greatest Love Songs.

After two years of waiting, Hole Below (20 Buck Spin) continues both the band’s fascination with the dark side of human relationships (‘In Sickness And In Death’, ‘Empty Breast’) and their mastery of cavernous but melodic morbid Death Metal. Vastum’s sound is much more rooted in DM orthodoxy than Portal and their imitators, but this is no crude exercise in “Old School” revivalism, either. A thick, powerful production enhances song-writing that forges Autopsy’s murky melodies to solid, punishing grooves and even a touch of the abyssal atmospheres explored by many modern Death Metal bands.

Hole Below sees Vastum explore their Doom and atmospheric elements more deeply than they did on Patricidal Lust, and the result is an album that perhaps lacks a little of its predecessors instant appeal, but which rewards perseverance. Big, decayed riffs drown in treacly feedback are still the core of their sound, but songs are structured less for violence and more for a slow-building of atmosphere.

Along with Cruciamentum, Vastum have produced some of the best straight-up Death Metal of the year. Not as brutal, as abstract or as alienating as some, but firmly treading a path which embraces Death Metal’s past as well as its future.

 

8.0/10

 

RICHIE HR


Grave – Out Of Respect For The Dead

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There’s nothing wrong with just picking something you’re good at and sticking with that. Some of Metal’s most influential and respected bands have become so through a lifetime spent mastering one narrow subgenre, but it’s a difficult road to tread – standing out above other bands while deliberately playing generic music is often a lot harder than being weird for its own sake.

Out Of Respect For The Dead (Century Media) is Grave’s eleventh full-length album since 1991, and anyone who comes to it expecting anything other than unrepentant, old-school Swedish Death Metal has made a grievous error, but you might not be expecting a group of veterans to sound quite so savage. From the moment ‘Mass Grave Mass’ bursts out of its fairly innocuous intro into a full-on face-kicking, it’s clear that over two decades of playing this style haven’t wearied them in the slightest, and the savage pace continues across the whole album, relenting only for the purpose of delivering crushing, Doom-tinged slow passages.

Unfortunately, the price they pay for this level of aggression is a loss of character, and it’s a price that may not be worth it. Old-school Death Metal can’t stand alongside some of the newer hybrids for sheer aggression – it’s the ability to juggle violence with sinister melody that keeps the style so appealing, and Out Of Respect… shows rather less of that than it should. Tracks tend to bleed into each other with little to separate them, and though they can catch your attention through sheer Fucking Hell aggression, they find keeping it much harder. At a time when old-school DM is so well represented by both fellow veterans Autopsy and Bloodbath (whose Grand Morbid Funeral stands as a modern classic of the style) and newer colleagues like Disma and Vastum, Grave are very notably lacking the personal touch that would make them stand out.

Out Of Respect For The Dead is, beyond question, a solid and competent album of genuinely savage Death Metal, but in a field already full of similar releases, it’s hard to really recommend it above anything else.

 

6.0/10

 

RICHIE HR