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VRENTH
Succumb To Chaos

Rotted Life (2022)
Rating: 8.5/10

Vrenth’s debut full-length outing Baptism Death (2020) was always going to be a winner considering it featured musicians from Ruin, Ascended Dead, VoidCeremony, Bloodsoaked and Dead Conspiracy, and so this follow up, Succumb To Chaos, was never going to let us down either.

As expected, the California band has produced another batch of billowing and primitive death metal songs that churn like rivers of ash, coursing with despicable melodies and squalid vocal gasps.

It’s no surprise that we’re treated to those deep, chugging aesthetics, like on opener ‘Omnipresence (Mors Certa / Hora Incerta)’ with its hulking atmosphere whereby pallid, gloomy solos squirm and revel beneath soggy riffage and dank percussion. And that theme continues throughout, leaving the listener reeking of damp and hallucinating the horrors depicted on the cover which pretty much sums up this blubbery mess of horror and chaos.

Vocalist Mike Nelson is one of those extreme metal vocalists that just demands respect as his growls permeate the foul air created by the fusty axe work. And buried beneath the mulch are some fine solos and weirdly melodic textures, but for the most part you’ll have to face biting gushes of ash which are spewed out from the very bowels of murk.

Charlie Koryn’s drums are hideous, archaic poundings which add layers of grime to this already sordid cavern of misery, but it’s the subtle twists which make this record so appealing.

Everything about this amorphous globule of extremity is slime-ridden yet monolithic, and at whatever pace it crawls or hurries there’s just a feeling of utmost doom. Whether it’s in the form of ‘Integrum Tenebrae’ with its creepy twists or the sickly tirade of ‘An Eternal Impious War’, you get drowned in a mouldy, and at times Bolt Thrower-esque drudgery fused with Demigod execution.

At its core this is a steaming, bubbling cesspit of brutality drenched in formidable structures which grasp and twist like a zombified alligator about to remove your limb. This is doom-laden death metal of the highest order.

Neil Arnold

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