Vortex of End, Fvlgvr Lvx Terror, France, Deadlight Entertainment, CD digipak (2015)
Since forming in 2005, the trio Vortex of End has taken its sweet time slowly and steadily building up its discography and “Fvlgvr Lvx Terror” is the second full-length release. From start to finish, apart from the first couple of minutes of found sound / spoken word monologue, this album is a brutal blackened death metal endurance test. The sound is actually very clean and clear though the bass is heavy and grinding as you might expect from VoE’s fusion genre. The percussion is thin for the style of music but it does complement the heavy concrete-slab guitars and bass very well.
Though the musicians play very well, they cram a lot of riffs into each song so the album ends up being one long series of nine linked chapters that have no clear identity of their own. Some songs have good catchy hooks and if these had been the main motifs for those tracks, they would have stood out from the rest of the album. Riffs are very chunky and jagged but each and every one of them gets lost in an abundance of such bits and pieces. As the musicians adhere to a minimal instrumental set-up of guitars, percussion and bass, the songs have less individuality again. The singing is thin, ragged and limited in range for the genre and it’s a real effort on the listener’s part to hear the vocals and what they might be about.
About halfway through we come to the short instrumental “Winds of Adversity” which has a post-BM feel in its higher-pitched guitar tones and general jazzy style with the drummer having the time of his life stretching all over the tom-toms and bashing the hell out of them. The opening riffs are forceful, crunchy and spiky-sharp, and if they had been used throughout the track to define it, this short piece would have been the highlight of the album.
Moments where the jangle lead guitar reminds me a bit of Deathspell Omega sends my brain deep into fits of black despair that that esteemed band has still not released a new full-length since 2010. The trio’s attacking approach on most songs – several come out of the starting gates head-on in spitting machine-gun fire mode – might be compared to another French black / death metal band Antaeus who also have not released a new album since … 2006. (Waaah!) Fortunately there is so much depth in French underground metal that even second-generation bands like DSO and Antaeus can take well-deserved breaks now and then, so I shouldn’t worry all that much.
Overall this is a good technical metal album but I confess my attention did wander quite a lot. The band’s sound is tinnier and more brittle, and less algae-encrusted swamp monster, than I’ve come to expect of black / death and I wonder if VoE might consider a more industrial bent to help vary their music. In most songs there are too many stop-start changes in the riffing, rhythms and beats for listeners to get a handle and be able to keep up with the music. The singing needs to be more upfront and a mix of clean and guttural or BM-rasping would be welcome. Still this is a very powerful and strong album with a good booming sound and there’s plenty of solid foundation for VoE to build upon and expand their musical horizons.