March 31, 2010

This isn’t your little sister’s favorite new album and won’t sit comfortably next to your Job for a Bearonce or your highfalutin hipster hybrids.  It’s classic death metal to the marrow: dark, dingy, and dangerous, simultaneously bucking ‘core and retro trends, the kind of music that inspires adolescent animal sacrifices and ritual suicides.
   
Songs move through a variety of tempos, unbridled speed collapses into murky dirges and explodes outward again.  Riffs are melodic in a rudimentary sense, typically shifting among only a few harmonically predictable chords, but pulsating above the rhythm create a vortex of momentum inward toward the song’s thematic core.  Subtle keyboards creep up unsuspected and largely unnoticed, not furthering a distinct compositional motive but drenching the album in suffocating dread.  Cavernous roars from one of the best new throats in death metal recite black rituals invoking chaos, welcoming entropy into the soul. 

Comparisons to Incantation and Imprecation are appropriate but are too facile to snapshot Vasaeleth in all their stygian glory.  Crypt Born & Tethered to Ruin delivers less in memorable moments than in its immersive experience.  It’s a concept album in the sense that songs don’t immediately distinguish themselves with head-turning riffs, less like craning your neck to catch a glimpse of car crash victims and more like being in the fucking car crash yourself, leaves you bleeding out of every orifice and quite certain a cackling little demon has made off with your soul.  

This is among the high points of the year for me so far, morbid, occult death metal courtesy of Profound Lore, which has a knack for catching wind of the best rising underground bands.   The death-worshipping duo Vasaeleth have offered up a memorable and significant debut in Crypt Born & Tethered to Ruin and established themselves as a band to watch. 

Release Date:January 29th, 2010
Label: Profound Lore

TRACK LISTING

1.  Wrathful Deities
2.  Figures of Chained Spirits
3.  Curse Seeping Through Flesh
4.  Gateways to the Cemetery
     of Being
5.  Poisoned Tongue
6.  Spirit of Noxious Miasmas
7.  Adorned & Iridescent
8.  Crypt Born & Tethered to Ruin

Total playing time:  30:05

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Vasaeleth - Crypt Born & Tethered to Ruin

Reviewer: Matt