Arson Cafe: Vermin Womb - Retaliation Review

Thursday, September 08, 2022

Vermin Womb - Retaliation Review

It's been six years since Vermin Womb's relatively decent but undeniably heavy debut Decline, and the band has returned with a vengeance in 2022 with an equally smashing work. Retaliation clocks at just 18 minutes (shorter than before), and takes no breaks, as all weapons in their arsenal are thrown at once from the first second. I am not sure if such approach has been more and more common among new bands that attempt extremity in their sound the last few years, or that I have been oblivious before, yet there's nothing less than non-stop hammering of violent riffs, ugly growls and background noise throughout the whole of Retaliation, which feels like the tree trunk feels when going through the wood chipper. Once you dig behind the aural malevolence, the guitar work is not groundbreaking, consisting of simplistic black / death / war metal lines, sometimes in irregular timestamps, the vocals - while brutal enough - barely change and the drums sometimes miss out, which clears out a tactic followed in Retaliation, the use of the production. The aim of this work is to create a thick layer of fast, uncomfortable and stressing music, making it more of a texture rather than a set of compositional undulations, and that's why the record can often sound a bit flat or indifferent if you look at it closely. I understand Vermin Womb have clear goals in their mind and negativity blisters everywhere in the essence of their work, which should go hand in hand with the material itself, yet I would have seriously prefered more insight in terms of musicianship. That being said, Retaliation has everything to be praised by fans of this extreme style, but do a test for yourself: play the tracks in shuffle and then see if you can tell one from the other. Nevertheless, the band's latest work keeps it up and is a solid effort that is worth listening, but if you enjoy it, then maybe you missed the point. [3/5 - Good]

Origin: United States

Label: Closed Casket Activities

Release date: 02.09.2022

Listen: Bandcamp

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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.