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VILESPAWN
Rotting Apparitions (2022)

This three-track demo comes from the darkest depths of the Chilean underground and I demand you keep an eye on these guys for future releases.

After a menacing brief introduction, Vilespawn kick into gear with a fiery assault of utmost devastation. ‘Perpetual Storms’ begins as a mid-paced tempo track that is built upon the vocal bellows of a fellow named “D”. The song soon picks up the pace and is threaded with a fantastically feverish solo and percussion that sounds like a box of skulls being thrown into the stony confines of a smouldering crypt. It’s very much aggressive death metal, more in the vein of the early-to-mid 90s rather than being sodden in utterly old school aesthetics, but these guys know how to slow the pace and batter the senses too.

The trio of tracks on offer are short, snappy designs, but you’ll soon find yourself jumping back into the twisted riffery of ‘Beyond The Realms Of Existence’ which is a maze of excellent axe work and slow, ponderous percussion whereby doom laden nuances laboriously plunder and a bone-shuddering bass judders with foreboding. This is the sort of track that more so taps in with the modern dynamics of putrid death metal where everything feels low-end and deep and gnawing, the duo sounding like they are dragging bags of sodden limbs into a cellar.

‘Beyond…’ is murky and murderous, and by far the best track here but it is sandwiched between the two faster expressions. That’s not taking anything away from ‘Perpetual Storms’ and closer ‘Vile Spawn’ which both exhibit the band’s more aggressive nature, although the latter has more variety and brings a stark, doomy glint as well.

Rotting Apparitions is a really good demo that shows a lot of promise as well as dollops of atmosphere and moodiness, suggesting further releases could be riddled with even more dark wells of morbidity and tension.

South America has always produced so many organic extreme metal bands and Vilespawn is another to add to the roster, and so let this be your latest soundtrack of death / doom horror to chew your limbs to.

For those interested, the Rotting Apparitions demo is available here.

Neil Arnold

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