Review Summary: "Oh, no tears please. It's a waste of good suffering..."
The black metal landscape has seen somewhat of a resurgence in the 2020s. Many bands are popping up all around the globe with fresh, innovative takes on a genre that is very minimalist in nature. Social outcasts are usually the type of people making black metal music, crying out for a way to express themselves, longing for understanding in this life. Veilburner are currently leading that charge, in my opinion, with their brand of vile and grotesque yet elegant dissonant black metal. This duo from Pennsylvania, consisting of vocalist/lyricist Chrisom Infernium and multi-instrumentalist Mephisto Deleterio, formed in 2013 and have been putting out incredible releases ever since.
Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy is their newest album, and while it doesn't edge out
The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom for me personally, it's still one of their greatest achievements to date and is most definitely their most mature sounding album.
The very first thing that I noticed about this beauty of an album is that the production is a bit cleaner this time around, but not clean to a detriment. Every single instrument is able to breathe freely. The off-kilter dissonance and echoing of the riffage makes you feel like you're stuck in a black abyss. While the production isn't as filthy this time around, it gives off a major “end of the world” type of vibe. It's almost as if these riffs were transported back from 100 years in the future, making your head bang with delight and surprise that these guys don't need to follow the same formula for every single album. Their previous releases had subtle differences with each one, but there is a clear shift in the way that the guys approached this album. Everything sounds a bit more technically proficient this time around. Not that they weren't previously, but the production really shines through in this aspect in particular.
The opening track, ‘Longing for Triumph…’, for example, starts off with some ghostlike, echoing chanting with a tribal drum beat and transitioning into dissonant, chugging metalcore-esque riffage, something new for the guys and a nice experimentation with different riff styles. After about two and a half minutes, the track explodes into a flurry of death metal brutality with frenetic blast beating and some absolutely vile guttural vocals. ‘Pestilent Niche’ is one of the heaviest tracks on the album and almost sounds like a full-on brutal death metal track at times.
‘That Which Crypts Howls Grandeur’ is probably my favorite track on the album with a flurry of distorted, avant-garde riffage and very Portal-esque blizzards of blast beats and vocals that are heavily influenced by the weirdness of the legendary Attila Csihar of Mayhem and Tormentor fame. Hell, you even have bells ringing like you're in some type of twisted church ceremony. You'll notice what I mean by the cleaner sounding production values letting all the instruments breathe so freely just by listening to this track alone. ‘Rigor and Wraith’ is almost a death doom track in nature with plodding rhythms and an overall feeling of dread.
Veilburner doesn't often get “progressive” as much as they are deeply unsettling in nature, but ‘Ouroboreal Whorl’ is a soaring, triumphant prog black metal banger that borders on sounding like a more sadistic version of Enslaved minus the folk/viking metal elements. The album comes to a close with ‘...Reeking of Tragedy’ and this track really takes everything that you've heard from the previous seven tracks and ties every element together so nicely to put a bow on this masterpiece.
This PA duo really has become one of my favorite bands of all-time over the past year. I haven't found anyone that blends weirdness, brutality and pure tightness quite like Veilburner does. Chrisom Infernium and Mephisto Deleterio are proving themselves to be top-notch black metal musicians, and the scary thing is, they just keep getting better and better. Every single release brings forth a honing of their sound while still adding new things here and there to keep things interesting.
Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy is just further proof that these guys are at the top of the current black metal scene.
