Album Review: Abyssius - Vermin
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I’ve a cautious relationship with melodeath (yes, yes, I know that’s not the genre tag they bear on Metal Archives, but for me it fits them much better than the alternatives I’ve seen). For me it often as not seems to describe music that takes aspects of extreme metal and contrives to make them as toothless as possible. There are obviously exceptions to this, and the genre has fans enough that this aversion is definitely more a “me” thing than a failing of the style itself, but even so, I hear the word “Melodeath” and I’m instantly wary, on guard like I’m creeping through a forest wearing pants made of bacon and someone just unleashed a pitbull. Maybe it’s just an entirely uncharitable level of musical bigotry on my part; it feels to me that a lot of melodeath lacks in a certain testicular fortitude, which grates for any number of reasons but as much as anything you don’t need to sacrifice your balls to be melodic. Take Nile for example – brutally heavy, but between “Annihilation of the Wicked”, “Masturbating the War God” and a hundred others ready proof is in abundance that you can still be unreasonably aggressive while containing deep melodicism. I bring all this unquestionably ignorant scribbling up to underline a point: Melodeath isn’t really my “thing”. So when I say that Abyssius are a good melodeath band, it should communicate one thing: If you like melodeath, you will have a hell of a time with this band.
Somewhere between older In Flames and Fit for an Autopsy, the band bolt an anthemic melodeath chainmail to the plate armour of modern metalcore and deathcore subgenres. Close your eyes when “Death Drive” is on and if you didn’t know better you could be smack bang in Gothenburg. If you love “The Jester Race” more than life itself, then there feels to be much about Abyssius that will also speak to that undying love of yours. For me though, it’s always the heavy that shall rule, and as it happens I’m in luck for Abyssius have that base covered too. “Black Dogs” is just vile. The swell of the high notes like air raid sirens while syncopated grooves gouge hasty bomb shelters out beneath you. A scattershot solo ratchets a panicked tension ever higher – klaxons and red strobes as the rumble of razing earth pushes down to terrified human huddles waiting helpless in hovels a stray hit from becoming a tomb. You can’t really have too many inches of concrete between yourself and high explosives, but if you had to put a number on it, you’d probably rather it wasn’t however much is “cost efficient”.
I’ve seen the band referred to as a tech-death group, and while I disagree with that label Abyssius are obviously a gifted bunch. They like their pyrotechnics, shredding their fretboards at frequent intervals with huge dramatic hooks everywhere else. It tries for explosive catharsis, big emotional swells and anthemic choruses. It is, for the most part, a winning combination – “Hesitation” has all the propulsion you’d expect from a death metal relative but packs in as much sugary catchiness as it can, coming across as an adrenaline shot buried in a glazed doughnut. There’s earnestness, such honest affection for the music subsumed within every second that the album becomes impossibly endearing in spite of it’s missteps – of which there is a small but pernicious handful. “Patricide” fumbles one of the best riffs on the album by sitting it next to a verseful of awkward, unseemly whisper-mumble vocals that sound a bit too similar to Jonathan Davis from Korn chuntering uncomfortable sweet nothings to me about nibbling my earlobes and threading spaghetti through my toes. Clean vocals are in general a weak spot, though thankfully a sparse one. “L’ Appel Du Vide” fares a bit better with them owing to the blackened mood of it being a more harmonious fit with the attempts at grandeur that the vocals make on the track, but those sections still stick out as unflattering. The same, alhamdulillah, cannot be said of the harsh vocals, which are uniformly grotesque in the best possible ways. The lofty peaks of sundered-air screeches to the chasm floor gutturals and all that wanders betwixt, when the roars come forth they do so with implacable authority. On the other hand, something about the drum sound felt off to me; performed excellently, no problems there, but it sounded a bit flat and so consistent that I initially took it to be a drum machine. It seems as though the band do in fact have a real boy for a drummer, so perhaps this is more of a production quirk that I’m not especially enamoured with.
Nonetheless, “Vermin” is overall good stuff, touching on a few genres while dodging the straightjacket of rigid adherence to any of them in full. The result is an album that feels familiar without ever incurring too heavy a debt to it’s influences to stand on it’s own two feet. It’s not faultless, and some of it’s flaws do feel frustrating in how much they can besmirch otherwise great material adjacent to it, but the all-important love for the music shines through and helps plaster some of those cracks closed. Maybe you’re one of those melodeath fans whose tastes I was somewhat dismissive of in my first paragraph; if so, thank you for bearing with me so long – and give Abyssius a go while you mull over what variety of ignominious execution my words have earned me, because their talent deserves your attention, because they’re evidently passionate about their craft and most importantly – because they’re fucking good.
