VLTIMAS - Something Wicked Marches In

With three death metal veterans coming together under one name, VLTIMAS from the start seemed stacked with enough star power to be too big to fail, but more often than not these supergroup formations end up exuding the side-project essence under which they form. And while they’re usually packed with plenty of talent and experience to at least make a passable and interesting enough record or several, the meeting of the minds in such settings only occasionally results in work that truly rivals the best of the members’ main projects’ output.
Sometimes projects like these form from a mutual desire among the members to express themselves musically in a way they feel is unfit for their main projects, but for David Vincent, Flo Mounier, and Rune Eriksen, VLTIMAS is another outlet for them to hammer out some straightforward death metal with some blackened fringes. It is usually these less stylistically adventurous projects that embody that typical supergroup average-ness (as opposed to the more eccentric projects that either strike unforeseen gold or flop), and VLTIMAS is no exception.
Something Wicked Marches In is a comprehensively influenced, evenly contributed, yet safe first album from the individually reputable trio. It’s not a very stylistically dynamic album either, with pretty much every track boasting the singeing combination of Eriksen’s eerie and apocalyptic black metal guitar dissonance and Vincent’s easily recognizable deathly snarls and growls over Mounier’s often rapid-fire (yet rarely flashy) percussive foundation. Even so, the combination of each member’s subtle differences in approach to metal makes for an at least fearsome abomination (in the positive, metal way) of a death metal album; the band make sure to work in enough compositional dynamic to keep the songs from droning on or running together, as I still found myself drawn to a couple of songs more than others for their composition (like the percussively dynamic title track and “Monolith”) or their more ambitious combination of styles (like the blackened death thrash fest of “Everlasting”, on which Mounier shines).
Indeed, Something Wicked Marches In is by no means the most ambitious project any of its members are involved in, and cynics might easily question the very point of their joining forces to just do what they could have easily done on their own with their respective main projects. Personally, I have no problem with VLTIMAS being just another outlet for the guys to do what they do well in a slightly different creative context. And who knows (maybe someone, but not me, because I didn’t get all that deep into the press surrounding this album), perhaps there was a more eccentric motive under which this project was founded that the members eventually drifted away from because they felt this came more naturally. Either way, I’m not here to fail a record that most definitely passes, and comes with a few worthwhile songs, just for the sake of advocating some misplaced elitist consumer pressure on artistic drives I can’t prove knowledge of the motives behind.
Breaking news: 3 good chefs make good food together/10

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more