I really rather liked the last album by these NZ shadows, ‘Malediction’ so was pleased to get this as a review, if not a little daunted. Well they are not exactly an easy band and this little musical piece weighs in at over an hour. Still, I volunteered so…

The title track crawls in on distorted noise before drumbeats pull a guitar from the depth. Doom drenched, whispered and growled voices it is not in a hurry to go anywhere other than into your guts to crawl around. Eerie guitar leads wander about until the whole thing coalesces into a thick black frantic riff. It changes tempo but never atmosphere. It throws guitar runs into the half-light and thickens the darkness with the sludgy, raw production. This is nasty, dirty blackened death metal once more with just that unravelling almost progressive edge to its funeral shroud. Like the rest of the album though this is not an easy ride. At twelve odd minutes and umpteen tempo changes even delving into a little melody, it cannot be used as wallpaper music but it is also so dense that making sense of its twists is not for those with short attention spans.

‘Egregore Rising’ follows with a little more black metal to the mix, a discordant guitar, the unsettling half whispered, half growled vocals. It drills down into Teitanblood territory in places, unrelenting in its push. Seven and a bit minutes.

‘Eyrie’, at ten and a half, rises into if not light then at least half gloom with a terrific heads down black riff, a tug at such threads as Mayhem and Blasphemy. The cavernous sounds of the voice probably speaking of atrocities I’d rather not know. We then get the ‘Black Talon’ interlude, a very effective bit of soundscaping, highlighting Vassafor’s grip on the world they are trying to paint for you. ‘The Burning Ithyr’ rumbles and grinds its way through nine minutes of Hell; like a WW1 tank crushing an ossuary it just crushes. It’s hard to describe the emotional weight this kind of song has; pressing down, pushing out all glimpses of light until you tumble down into some collapsing cavern. From whence come the ‘Emanations From The Abyss’…. Before plunging into the final seventeen minute horror of ‘Singularity’.

‘singularity begins with a twinkle of simple guitar plucking before the speedy riff erupts with screeching guitars alongside. Then everything just collapses inwards under its own weight – pulled down into the black centre of some nuclear madness. Somehow though, even down here, order is maintained even if sanity isn’t. The riffs make sense, the tempo changes follow and a passage of quiet and cosmic calm in the void. A guitar rises once more; melodic but slightly unhinged, fluttering. Trying to escape maybe as the bass and drums and whispered voices seek to pull it back down. It’s a long torturous haul.

There is so much ambition here, and the chops to back it up. The question comes though, in the cold dawn having escaped, as to how many will make it through to the end of this? This is a difficult album in the extreme: I can’ criticise the length of songs as these songs are exactly what was intended. You couldn’t just slice of six minutes here and three minutes there. It would be nonsense. Nor could you remove any. This is the album, the vision that Vassafor had. But fuck if it isn’t hard to crawl your way through to the bitter end. I have, multiple times and each one has left my brain almost seized up. I repeat: This is hard.

Impressively crafted, pure in vision, relentless and pitch thick black music. Just hard. And I guess, that’s the point. This was never meant to be easy.

(7/10 Gizmo)

https://www.facebook.com/Vassafor

https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/vassafor-to-the-death