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VILE APPARITION
Malignity

Dark Descent / Me Saco Un Ojo (2025)
Rating: 7.5/10

Very much anchoring themselves to a mid-to-late 90s death metal aesthetic, Melbourne, Australia-based Vile Apparition conjures their full-length sophomore Malignity. This is one of those surprisingly vibrant extreme metal albums which literally hammers from the off to the very end.

I’m thankful it’s relatively short at 34 minutes because some of the riffs gouge the eyes out and as you’re left wandering blind you then have to fend off the pummelling rhythms of the percussion and bass. However, the biggest attraction here is the melodies. At times you think a blazing solo is going to melt into a traditional metal passage, like on ‘A Canvas Of Corpses’, but the album is littered with such sublime scenarios.

There are moments of intricacy too, with the likes of ‘Thriving On Disease’ providing some interesting angles amidst the bluster. Such flashes create an almost schizophrenic backbone whereby riffs deviously thrash before being punctured by a pinched chord. It’s with songs like ‘Emulsifying Fleshpress’ that Vile Apparition swerves toward a tech-death style but without over-reaching the parameters.

There’s no blinding complexity as such, just clever barbaric pulverisation. High levels of savagery are implemented as Vile Apparition gnashes at the sinews, snapping away feverishly but without embellishing much of an atmosphere. The highs are many and the losses are few, but in such a fiercely contested genre of swamp gloom and ghoulish doom, I don’t see Malignity as being on heavy rotation.

Neil Arnold

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