Vermin - Verminlust (Black Metal)

Formed from the rawest swamps of subconscious horrors, desires and fears, Verminlust strikes with an immersive atmospheric assault of eerie, spine-chilling riffs and a relatively technical style of black metal, finding a balance in the overall rhythmic structure of these songs to force the listener through cycles of gruesome violence and diabolical pain.

Enjoying the abrupt, the brutal and the macabre, Vermin alternates between structures with no warning and, in the style of the Phantom school, makes use of its phrasal riffs in context of song structure and, in that mindset, often diverges or leaps to a change unpredictably, with infernal dexterity and demonic sagacity.

Rolling riffs of bestial tremolo-picking connect songs in a sequence of tone and rhythm, flowing into one in a style reminiscent of Mindless Horror. However, unlike Phantom, Vermin often drops into varied rhythms seamlessly and then brutally accelerates, driving anthems of dissonance and dissent with a fast and precise blackened grindcore drumming under a hoarse and hollowed voice of gutted vocal cords.

While at some points riff salad prevails, most notably on the title track, it is as in bands like Phantom and Neraines unified by core rhythm and sense of structure in motion, and the resulting series of parallelic structures provides for mazelike yet clairvoyant song writing.

While on their future releases, notably the terrifying Archangel, Vermin would veer more into pure black metal territory, this release Verminlust is perhaps the pinnacle of blackened death metal.