Album Review: Vile Desolation - Annihilating The Consciousness
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Vile Desolation. They’re an Indonesian death metal band – which will likely clue you in to what this sounds like. Every member is in a minimum of four other projects, because Indonesians seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for death metal. And I’m very glad about that, because this album is an absolute war machine of a release.
Good brutal death should sound a bit like someone is throwing grenades through a jet turbine. Vile Desolation immediately tick this box with ruinously heavy guitar tones and a drum kit like an armada broadside. They waste no time in announcing their presence, cracking their knuckles with a series of slams and lingering discordant notes before firing into the distance at warp speed from 1.18 onwards. They do such a good job at smashing amazing sections of fleet, grinding, atonal riffs into shuddering slams that hit like yanking the handbrake at 300 miles per hour; grooves like lava flows following eruptions of speed and grimacing chromatic technicality delivered with this laser precision that speaks to how much cumulative experience being in roughly a million bands grants you. I’m not sure I could pick a favourite song – they all send my serotonin levels punching into low orbit. Crunching muted power chords slinging into discordant arpeggios that hang with the languid sway of guts laced through branches. Blurs of lower-register technicality, skittering over the first few frets like millipede limbs. Drums powering through a breathless routine of blasts, fills and grooves, vocals a phlegm-slick gurgle from some lightless pit in the deepest of oceanic trenches. All of it played tight as thumbscrews. It’s every single thing my eardrums are craving and more besides.
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