Vanhelgd – Atropos Doctrina Review

By Kenstrosity

My third review ever for this site covered Swedeath quartet Vanhelgd’s fifth outing Deimos Sanktuarium. I was still a n00b then, and my reference points for a great many albums then pales in comparison to the arsenal of touchstones at my disposal today. Six years after my inevitable installment as Grand Spongus of Angry Metal Guy, Vanhelgd marks my first repeat band from my n00b era as they prepare to unleash their sixth salvo, Atropos Doctrina. There’s no time like the present to revisit a band from my critical upbringing. Onwards, to Atropos Doctrina!

Six years between albums changed Vanhelgd, but not as much as some might reasonably expect. Their crunchy combination of Desolate Shrine somberness and Aphyx stomp remains largely unscathed by the passage of time. However, gone entirely are those occasional dalliances with the English language. Good riddance. Also diminished in quantity, Deimos Sanktuarium’s hooky vocal refrains—delivered with an assortment of harsh vox, gang shouts, and ecclesiastical cleans—make way for more guitar-forward fixes (“Kom dödens tysta ängel,” “Gravjordsfrid”). Vanhelgd’s production values shifted, too, moving from a naturally powerful assortment of tones and textures to a thinner, boomier, and louder sonic palette to the record’s detriment. In mood, Atropos Doctrina makes for a more mournful outing than past releases, moving further into doom territory than ever before and evoking a weeping sort of death we more commonly hear from contemporaries like Be’lakor and The Drowning—and used to hear from classics like My Dying Bride (“I ovigd jord”). Overall, though, Vanhelgd successfully maintain their identity as another solid Swedish death metal band sporting a tasteful application of the style.

Consistency is Atropos Doctrina’s greatest asset. Forty minutes of rock-solid, somber death metal that glides through movements as a knife through softened butter, Atropos Doctrina represents Vanhelgd’s songwriting touchstones at their most fluid. After a quick, no-nonsense ripper that immediately launches the record into an adrenaline rush (“Saliga äro de dödfödda”), “Kom dödens tysta ängel” gently grounds me with a more mid-paced march that keeps the energy up just enough to leave me wanting more. More is exactly what I get as the record proceeds in that mid-paced, lightly melodic vein until just over midway through. At that point, album highlight “Atropos Hymnarium” absolutely obliterates my bones with a raucous, and thoroughly unexpected, Black Royal riffset that would fit right at home on Firebride. A chef’s kiss moment if there ever was one. I don’t have to wait very long before the next memorable moment either, as the back end of the record prioritizes tight, well-edited numbers that say what they have to say and move right along. This allows closer “Gravjordsfrid” to hit twice as hard with its main melody, a sullen but emotive refrain that strikes the heart and tugs at its strings. As the song transitions into a piano rendition of that same theme, I feel the weight of woe lighten into newfound peace, marking the final rest of Atropos Doctrina as it fades to black.

Unfortunately, as Atropos Doctrina fades to black each time, I feel very little draw to the idea of returning. This record contains within it a number of compelling passages and beautiful moments (just listen to those lead guitars on “I ovigd jord”), but in between those sparks of brilliance lies a preponderance of stock-standard blackened, melodic death metal that hardly moves the needle past average. As a result, half of the record enters one ear and falls unceremoniously out of the other even during focused spins. I don’t take this term lightly, yet the ultimate takeaway is that much of Atropos Doctrina is generic. Competent and enjoyable, but generic. Consequently, all that the record’s more pedestrian offerings can hope to achieve is to keep the momentum going strong (“Ofredsår,” “Galgdanstid”). Thankfully, that’s exactly what they do. Nonetheless, and especially for a band as well-established and obviously well-versed as Vanhelgd, it takes more than that to stand out.

At the end of the day, Atropos Doctrina is an enjoyable, if ultimately unremarkable slab of sorrowful Swedeath. Vanhelgd understand their sound and wield it well, but they need to either explore more distinctive ways of approaching the format or further capitalize on their best ideas if they want to make a lasting impression. I don’t envy them the task, but I wish Vanhelgd luck, and remain hopeful for what comes next.

Rating: Mixed
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Dark Descent Records
Websites: vanhelgd.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/vanhelgd
Releases Worldwide: July 12th, 2024

#25 #2024 #Asphyx #AtroposDoctrina #BeLakor #BlackRoyal #BlackenedDeathMetal #DarkDescentRecords #DeathMetal #DesolateShrine #Jul24 #Review #Reviews #SwedishMetal #TheDrowning #Vanhelgd

Construct of Lethe – A Kindness Dealt in Venom Review

By Dear Hollow

Construct of Lethe embodies a constant limbo of underrating, often in cahoots with acts like Desolate Shrine or Lantern in that they lay delicate fingers upon dissonance and grime without diving headlong into them, oft sporting a blackened edge. Instead of buying into mimicry, Tony Petrocelly’s quartet Construct of Lethe has embodied a darkness all of their own, beginning with 2016’s Corpsegod, a raw and angular take on death metal, and perfected in 2018’s more triumphant Exiler, which was given the TYMHM treatment by the gone-but-unforgotten Kronos. First album in six years, A Kindness Dealt in Venom attempts to break their silence with an ambitious album designed as one continuous track with twelve distinct movements.

Construct of Lethe merely dabbles in dissonance and grime, but that doesn’t mean A Kindness Dealt in Venom is an easy or pleasant listen. Rather, there is a veil draped across its entire visage, ghostly and punishing in equal measure. Uncompromisingly bleak and haunting, it is an album you get lost in, and one you can be proud to blare at maximum volume, a challenger for fans of classic Morbid Angel, Immolation, or Hate Eternal, and for diehards of the more dissonant stylings of Noctambulist or Heaving Earth alike. Divisively more experimental and far more contemplative and divisive than its predecessors in a more pronounced doom presence and instrumental saturation, A Kindness Dealt in Venom nonetheless offers no reprieve.

Construct of Lethe first and foremost attacks their third full-length with a sense of menacing organicity and miasmic fluidity – with complete shredding in mind. You have your more predictable death metal affairs, touched upon by blastbeats and chunky riffs a la Morbid Angel or Bolt Thrower, in tracks like opening movement “Artifice” or “Denial in Abstraction,” but the true highlights are feats of songwriting that revel in a more slow-moving and ominous pace, as the dissonant jangling saturating “Contempt” and the pulsing tribal elements of “I Am the Lionkiller” inject palpable dread. Longest track “Bete Noir” is an easy climax, its nine-minute breath oozing through pulsing death/doom beatdowns of raucous percussion, thick bass, and a dynamic with disintegration in mind. Eating at the ears like a more insidious but deadlier pyroclastic flow, the percussion acts like the hammering of the anvil while the sliding interchange between Morbid Angel riffs and Immolation blasphemy in the soundtrack of madness. “Labyrinthine Terror” and closer “Tension – There is Nothing for You Here” exemplify this lethal fusion likewise, recalling more high-minded assaults like Labyrinth of Stars or Sulphur Aeon. Construct of Lethe expertly balances a dissonant death template with old school death shredding in an album that mightily succeeds in both.

Truthfully, there are no blatantly bad tracks aboard A Kindness Dealt in Venom, but the implications of its pacing and flow are questionable at best. Construct of Lethe’s first act up until “Denial in Abstraction” will have you believe that this is a pure death metal foray (like Corpsegod or Exiler) but when the second act begins you are unwittingly met with a series of build-ups with little capitalization. Tracks “Flickering,” “I Am the Lionkiller,” “Paroxysm as Pratmatism,” “Raw Nerve, Iron Will,” “Sacrosanct,” and “Tension – There is Nothing For You Here” are all instrumentals stacked in the latter half,1 and are likewise all incredibly brief affairs, the shortest “Sacrosanct” clocking in at less than a minute. I understand that Construct of Lethe composed this album as a single track with twelve movements, but this whiplash from instrumental to instrumental, with incredible dynamic builds leading to musical dead-ends, is a head-scratcher. It’s as if they included new vocalist Kishor Haulenbeek in the first half of the album then abruptly fired him before the second – even though the guy’s still employed. The flow is therefore problematic, as the first half of the album constitutes thirty minutes of the album’s forty-five. As “Bete Noir” stands as a potential SOTY, it puts all following tracks in its shadow – which sucks, because there are ten.

Construct of Lethe proves they are masters of their craft with A Kindness Dealt in Venom, but it’s almost entirely derailed by its odd tracklist. Especially when Petrocelly and company have never included an instrumental in Exiler or Corpsegod, it’s confusing why suddenly A Kindness Dealt in Venom features six of them – primarily in the second half. Don’t get me wrong, each track is fantastic, blending purist death metal with dissonant and avant-garde tendencies that never derail it due to organic production and songwriting. However, for an album that professes a cohesive whole, Construct of Lethe has never felt more disjointed. Bang your head while scratching it.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Transcending Obscurity Records
Websites: constructoflethe.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/constructoflethe
Releases Worldwide: June 21st, 2024

#2024 #30 #AKindnessDealtInVenom #AmericanMetal #AtmosphericDeathMetal #BoltThrower #ConstructOfLethe #DeathMetal #DesolateShrine #DissonantDeathMetal #HateEternal #HeavingEarth #Immolation #Jun24 #LabyrinthOfStars #Lantern #MorbidAngel #Noctambulist #OldSchoolDeathMetal #Review #Reviews #SulphurAeon #TranscendingObscurityRecords

Drowned – Procul His Review

By Dear Hollow

Whether they like it or not, Sulphur Aeon left its mark on the death metal world. While it’s easy to focus on their lyrical themes and reverence for the Great Old Ones as a lyrical monument, their straightforward approach tinged with blackened precision and colossal atmosphere extends to more than the Cthulhu worshipers out there. Take their fellow Germans, the longstanding death metal act Drowned. While the lyrics of Procul His revolve around things like the occult, darkness, and abstract themes, you’ll find that the sound feels straight outta the Antisphere. Death metal’s barbarity is channeled through the discreet and sinister palette of darkness, and the atmosphere is front and center.

Contrary to the epic overwhelm of Devenial Verdict or the smoke-filled opaqueness of Desolate Shrine, Berlin trio Drowned dwells in minimalist compositions. While vocalist and bassist Greg Circum offers a weighty roar that drips in blackened menace and drummer Tobias Engl’s technique is rock-solid, the crawling subdued riffs and patient plucking of former Necros Christos guitarist Tlmnn are the real star of the show. The trio’s second full-length is undeniably evocative, a mysterious and ominous sermon tinged with malice, although the brutality remains absent and replay value is sparse. It’s worth a spin for the fans of the more contemplative side of death metal but offers little else.

What Drowned does well is concoct its tracks with patience, and even the more vicious cuts are steeped in mystery. Openers “Star Tower” and “Phantom Stairs” are squirming dirges of semi-dissonant leads and simple drumming, while brutal death growls dominate the palette. “Corpse God” features a pendulum swing of a 6/8 timing, which injects a distinct madness to the proceedings, while the synth adds a dark twist to “Seed of Bones.” More energetic cuts abound in the second act, as “Malachite Mirror,” “Man in Devil in Man,” and “Blue Moth Vault” offer influences of blackened death and blastbeats, respectively, with blazing tremolo lighting the way through dark and gloomy soundscapes. Minimalism nevertheless remains a stalwart in these heavier interpretations even so, as bass remains nearly inaudible underneath the guitar-centric approach and Circum’s vicious vocals. Drowned toes the line between blackened death and old-school philosophies, most effectively culminating in the riffiest cut “Chryseos Vas,” which effectively exchanges deathy chugs for blackened intensity and back again, with a charisma found in doom’s mammoth halls while its more patient crescendos are achieved in climactic crusty passages.

The primary issue with Procul His is that Drowned fails to claim any sense of memorability throughout the album’s protracted 44-minute length. It’s a gloomy affair, mastery of dark melody on full display in ways that recall Sulphur Aeon’s latest, but lacking the colossal quality and fully immersive experience that makes the Lovecraftian songstresses so effective. Thus, no riff sticks in the brain, with potentially unhinged brutality a la Vitriol or Hate Eternal tidily confined to the safety of its atmospheric compositions. Opener “Star Tower,” while creepy-crawly, is remarkably limp in its painfully sparse melodies and simple lack of things going on. Drowned’s energetic back-half blurs together due to jarring passage shifts between riffs and plucking and punky passages with little apt transition between it all, with “Man in Devil in Man,” “Blue Moth Vault,” and “Seed of Bones” being just a kinda pleasant blur from start to end. That’s the problem with Procul His: there’s very little explicitly bad about it, but there’s nothing that stands out either.

The first half, despite the limp opener, had me hoping to hang my antlers once again upon the Three Tree with Drowned’s effectiveness in conjuring a dread-inducing and nightmarishly vivid atmosphere through minimalist tools. While I initially thought “Man in Devil in Man” was a welcome jolt of energy, it instead signaled a wave of uninspired death metal from an act that could do so much better. While it ends on a good note that balances its effective assets, it does not conclude an effective album. The balance between menacing atmosphere and devastating death metal is an admirable attempt, but too often it becomes a balance of too little and too much across its two halves. Drowned features an enticing aura of madness and mystery, but in a way that “We have Sulphur Aeon at home” does.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Sepulchral Voice Records
Websites: drowned.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/drowned.death.metal
Releases Worldwide: January 26th, 2024

#20 #2024 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #BlackenedDeathMetal #DeathMetal #DesolateShrine #DevenialVerdict #Drowned #GermanMetal #HateEternal #Jan24 #ProculHis #Review #Reviews #SepulchralVoiceRecords #SulphurAeon #Vitriol

Convocation – No Dawn for the Caliginous Night Review

By Cherd

In the wretched realms of death metal, Finland’s Lauri Laaksonen is a known commodity. After a five-year stint in Sear, LL, as he’s credited on most liner notes, founded the beastly Desolate Shrine in 2010. We here at AMG have for the most part fawned in a most undignified manner over that project’s output. On the strength of that discography alone, LL could hold his head high among his most celebrated death metal contemporaries. But his impact on the genre doesn’t end there. Since 2018, LL has released some of the very finest slabs of demoralizing deathly doom in recent memory through his band Convocation. Between debut Scars Across and follow-up Ashes Coalesce, Convocation gave us eight massive cuts of ponderous death doom that often strays into dilatory funeral doom of a stately mien. We now come to the third album of LL’s secondary project, No Dawn for the Caliginous Night, and the approach is largely the same with one noticeable augmentation. When measuring out his ingredients for this particular recipe, our boy got to “towering majesty,” mistook for gallons what should have been ounces and added several orders of magnitude more than was called for.

On Convocation’s debut, there was a definite Evoken vibe to songs like “Ruins of Ourselves” and “Allied POWs,” but Ashes Coalesce saw them moving toward a sound more their own, built on subtle mood shifts and a multi-layered vocal attack courtesy of Waste of Space Orchestra’s Marko Neuman. Neuman is in similar form on No Dawn for the Caliginous Night—more on that in a bit—but “subtle” is no longer a word that applies to the music. In fact, hold up that word to No Dawn… and it will melt into a streak of fire like a space rock burning up upon its descent into Earth’s atmosphere. By the time you reach the halfway point in opening track “Graveless yet Dead,” you’ve heard swirling organs, ominous violins, harmonized choirs, riffs that measure their gravity on the scale of celestial bodies, and Neuman’s enormous death roar. The whole thing keeps escalating like a light growing in intensity until, nearly blinding, a biblically accurate angel emerges with its six wings and concentric wheels full of eyes and multiple heads and burnished bronze appendages and it bellows in an inhuman voice, “B̴̧̈E̴͝ͅ ̸̫̈Ń̷̦Ò̸̭T̸̜̈́ ̸̟̄A̷͈͌F̵̯̊R̴̳̽Ā̷͇I̸̜͊D̶͈͛.”

No Dawn… maintains this monumental scale for its full 48-minute runtime, but smart songwriting and a symmetrical album structure keep all that grandeur from feeling one-note. With the instrumental track “Between Aether and Land” acting as a sort of intermission, the two tracks before it present at once sublime and terrifying death doom that never dips below white-knuckle intensity. Convocation may interject passages of clean guitar lines and overt gentleness, like the one found halfway through “Atychiphobia,” but these are will-o’-the-wisps, false lights in the darkness they use to lure you into compliance before unleashing their nastiest riffs and most harrowing tectonic shifts. After the pivotal instrumental, the last two tracks are much more funereal. “Lepers and Derelicts” is the standout, if one must be chosen, with its lugubrious aura and methodically measured guitar line motif, like a bell tolling over a cemetery.

As with 2020’s Ashes Coalesce, Neuman’s impressively variegated vocal performance lifts the already stellar material on No Dawn… to a level beyond that of the band’s death doom peers. Blessed with an ideal death roar, he really knows when to let it fly, like when he expends every ounce of vein-popping energy as a counterpoint to the album’s most traditionally mournful instrumentation on closer “Procession.” Meanwhile, his judiciously applied cleans crash through the opiate haze of “Lepers and Derelicts” to carry the song to giddy heights in its final minutes. Rock solid as his performance is throughout, the most unforgettable moment is when he discharges a blood-freezing banshee wail in “Atychiphobia,” a trick he repeats to bring “Lepers and Derelicts” freefalling back to earth in its final seconds. Early in my listening, I considered the instrumental track a drawback. Now I see it as a theatrical intermission; a necessary respite from the otherwise unrelenting intensity Neuman brings to LL’s project.

I loved both of Convocation’s previous records. With No Dawn for the Caliginous Night, LL and Neuman have completed their transformation from practitioners of impressive, if well-trod death doom to a unique voice in the ranks of funerophiles. This is a towering celebration of death’s enormity, packaged in the heaviest and most shimmering of vessels.

Rating: 4.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Everlasting Spew Records
Websites: everlastingspewrecords.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/ConvocationDoom
Releases Worldwide: November 24th, 2023

#2023 #45 #Convocation #DeathDoom #DeathMetal #DesolateShrine #DoomMetal #EverlastingSpewRecords #Evoken #FinnishMetal #FuneralDoom #NoDawnForTheCaliginousNight #Nov23 #Review #Reviews #Sear #WasteOfSpaceOrchestra

https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/fires-of-the-dying-world

#DesolateShrine #deathmetal

So macht die Vorweihnachtszeit so richtig Spaß.

War für 2022 eines der Highlights. Besinnlicher wird's heute nimmer. 🤘