Review Summary: The wolf is the saviour of the lamb.
Must death metal progress?
This is my adversarial return to the seemingly eternal discourse around the contemporary death metal climate’s obsession with the past. Ten to one odds, that new death metal band is going to be a simple addition of their choice 90s influences. And why should they not be so fixated? The culture of heavy metal has always been sort of insular, valorizing commitment and credibility with regards to our musical heritage above most other things. Not to mention our broader societal comfort in nostalgia. The literal imagery of a lot of early death metal is with the undead, skeletons and zombies. Let the rotted remains rise again and again to devour the living, let them reign over this damned, burning world. It can’t get any worse.
So, must it?
Well, probably, but if you can’t make it fresher, make it meaner. Enter Vastum.
The San Francisco quintet have littered the 2010s with the bleakest death metal of this generation, and their first outing of the decade, 2023’s Inward to Gethsemane, is no different. A palpable atmosphere of menace overlies the proceedings in a way that simply isn’t replicated by many others. Opening and closing touchstones, “In Bed With Death” and “Corpus Fractum”, both offer up dark ambience in trim doses to punctuate the titanic riffs to come. The instruments entwine in a near constant discordant rumble, general clarity where needed but all the grit and torn viscera that’s demanded. Copious reference to forebears is part and parcel with death metal critique, and the names that spring to mind here are the likes of mighty Incantation or Disma or Funebrarum. The tempo is most often middling to produce a catharsis in the titanic chord slams between slithering, serpentine tremolo runs. Morbid Angel’s occult, daemonic evil is present lyrically and in some of the note choices, if not their overall compositional chaos.
The centerpiece of Vastum’s songwriting continues to be the vocal interplay between guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf and primary vocalist Daniel Butler. They both stick to echoey rasps and growls, but there’s a subtle distinction between them to be picked out, and in tandem they produce a grotesque conversational texture, as of yammering demons in debate. Leila even produces the chilling clean vocals buried in the background of "Stillborn Eternity".
As a collective piece, Inward to Gethsemane offers only momentary surprise, but maximum punishment. And that’s apt, isn’t it? Death metal could never be of Heaven, and it may not be of Earth either, except in its destruction, but it is of Hell, that place of eternal damnation and torment. Revel in thy flesh, for as long as it clothes thy bones.
