And once again you never know what you’ll get with an Aesthetic Death release but it will be different. And this album by the Finnish Vaina is certainly that. Amusingly their entry on Metal Archives just says black metal.

Um. Where to begin. ‘-1+1’. Off key strummed acoustic guitar, plinking guitar, odd noises and dark intoned vocals interspersed. Oh and out of time. It’s a disorienting noise that fades into a drone and dies… And then we get ‘Adom Olam’. Imagine the weird wanderings and screams of Dodheimsgard circa 666 International, that almost industrial guitar and crashing rhythm. For about three minutes before dying into silence and we get throbbing bass and keyboards. Eventually it rises into a screeching, chaotic guitar and repetitive semi riff and echoing harsh vocals as the backdrop. It’s…an odd eight minutes. But good.

‘Athame Fine Arts’ is dark, slow and moody electronica, Numan-eque in its soundscape but with an intense bass rumbling intruding now and then. It enthrals, certainly and has a smoothness, an accomplishment that makes the layering seem so easy and so thought out but not fussy. ‘Anti-Utopia’ again knocks you off balance. A stop/start intro becomes more fluid, into a relentless and even anachronistic rapid drumbeat machine but paired with slow, meandering twisted vocals while the cosmic and Midnight Odyssey touched velvet melody slowly progresses. It should be wrong but…it really grips you.

‘404’ is almost slow EBM dancing around early My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult or the Electric Hellfire Club. Dance rhythm beats and bleeps with dark atmosphere and dense vocals. Hypnotic. Strange. ‘The Lord’s Raper’ is wilder, the madly winding guitar running rings and ripples round the experimental black metal core. A curious pairing to be sure.

The ten minute ‘Har Haoser’ with what sounds like a life monitor bleeping slides into a slow, almost gentle darkness. The guitar is slower, more sane. Mostly. The keyboards like drapes round a bed as outside the observers listen, occasionally chant. Maybe waiting for the soul to depart from the dying. The heart monitor flatlines, the cosmic passage beyond is ringed with electronic angels, or demons. Maybe.

‘Reign In Love’ is like some slow, creeping, quiet version of Excessive Force with Numan style dark melody. Speaking voices babbling with little clarity then deathly rasping sounds overtake; the intent disorienting. ‘Nihil Novi’ a slow but not pleasant interlude; the kind that may be quiet but still hurts your brain as it pushes in. Until finally ‘Biblia Vol. 2’ crawls malevolently across eleven minutes. A choral sound that has nothing angelic, those rasping vocals, high pitched keening guitar scratching trembling notes across the dark before whatever it is moving towards bares its teeth and drags it into screeching howling chaos. And is gone.

And if you have it on a loop that closing rasp of “…satanas..” is spat back out backwards for the opener ‘-1+1’. Eating itself or regurgitating?

Vaina have produced a strange and unbalanced work in Futue Te Ipsum. Experimental, dark and meticulously planned. It moves, it travels, it hypnotises and it corrupts. Industrial, EBM, tentacles of black metal and satanic ambient flow from one to the other in perfect coordinated intent. It’s odd. Different. Intelligent. Atmospheric and occasionally disturbing.

What it most certainly is not is just black metal. It will satisfy any part of your soul that revels in the oblique approach and the sideways step into the darkness.

Very much recommended.

(9/10 Gizmo)

https://www.facebook.com/vainaband

https://vaina.bandcamp.com/album/futue-te-ipsum-angel-with-many-faces-2

https://www.aestheticdeath.com/releases.php?mode=singleitem&albumid=5448