i absolutely love ulcerate and would most likely praise anything they do, but really enjoying the new album. still requires plenty more listens to fully digest everything but sounds excellent thus far. up there with gorguts for album of the year at the moment

This is amazing. Like, beyond what I ever could have imagined they could do amazing. This is as tight and gripping as Everything is Fire, but with a whole different level of density and chaotic layering. The frantic stuff is more insane and more impressive than ever, the slow stuff is heavier, darker and tighter than ever, the production has everything at the right volumes, the lower guitars are crunchy and devastation, the twangs and buzzing, Mitochondrion-esque contrasting high notes are sharp and piercing, yet still aurally pleasing to the ear. This is Ulcerate perfected. I don't know what they can do after this, because fuck, this is perfect.

I'm not even an Ulcerate fanboy, I outright hated the last album, and EiF was still only tenth or so in my best of for that year, so I came into this expecting absolute shit, but this is brilliant. This could be my favourite dissonant death metal album ever released. I love this a disgusting amount.

Listened to this album yesterday and listening again today at work, and I'm going to echo that it's a very, very good album. It's not a "one long song made up of eight individual songs" type album, but you have to listen to the whole thing once you hit play on the record. The album ebbs and flows wonderfully, and while I still think EiF had better riffs, everything just works so well here to create a very dense atmosphere, and the driving compositions really help this album as far as memorability is concerned. Much, much better than Destroyers of All.

Broken headphones? I hate that. My 80.00 Sennheiser headphones broke. I turned to a video on youtube to help me repair them. 25.00 soldering iron, 5.00 of solder, not one but two 8mm connectors (botched the first one) and a few hours of my time resulted in them working perfectly again. Stronger wire, gold plated and also stronger plug.

Pain in the ass but a man cannot be without his headphones.

I'm really digging Clutching Revulsion and it's only the third track I've heard so far. All the adulation is well deserved and the band has really outdone themselves. It's matured and controlled in terms of the content and sound, not overdone at all. I shall get back to checking out the rest of this!

I've had some time to digest this, and I'm in love. Vermis is like dropping a nuke on all sensory perception; it's utter chaos and insanity. Definitely on my Top 10 list this year.

Since everyone is loving this album so much I feel the need to put a disclaimer before continuing typing. Warning, this will be an exercise in dissent.

I quite like the first two albums, and much like many others I've welcomed The Destroyers Of All as a massive disappointment. That album did absolutely nothing for me, it meandered endlessly and never managed to captivate me the slightest bit. I've listened to it on and off over the course of an entire year and it never did anything for me. So it's hard to say that I had any kind of expectations where Vermis is concerned.

Still, I feel like this album is an even bigger disappointment! Weird isn't it?!

Well, I for one think the production is a bit off. The mixing is pretty weird, almost as if the instruments were purposely colliding, and while it makes up for a massive "wall of sound" approach it often leaves little room for dynamics to breathe. I also think the drums and bass are mixed pretty weirdly, with the first being mostly just rumbling in the background and the later having the kick sounding awkward and way too loud. The vocals are give or take, but at points where he's just spitting out mouthful it feels a bit off as well. The only album where I really appreciated the vocals was in EIF, but here they often stick out way too much in a "WOOOCHHHOOOO" kind of way. It also bugs me a little that the first half of the album doesn't have fade outs or transitions between the songs, as they end abruptly into a halt before the next one begins. This doesn't happen on "side B" though and that's pretty bizarre to be honest. But I guess that what annoys me the most is the tone of the guitars because they often sound too thin for their own good. They lack a thicker tone and an extra crunch to accompany the immense sound that they're trying to pierce. Alas, that's exactly how they often sound, like they're trying to pierce through a rumbling storm only to come out very thin on the other side.

"Clutching Revulsion" is a song that I really don't get. I don't get where it tries to go and why it ends the way it does. "Weight of Emptiness" is an almost 8 minute long meandering exercise in 2011 Ulcerate, which is the same to say that it bores me to tears. To be completely honest though I actually like the three song segment between "Confronting Entropy" and "The Imperious Weak", which may very well be the best song of the album. But then "Cessation" comes in and it's side A once again. Incredibly boring "riffs" that only serve as sonic textures but give no proper meat, quiet sections reminiscent of TDOA that absolutely go nowhere, and a plunge from extreme brutality into an apparent calm that goes back and forth. It's curious to realize that there are elements from all their previous albums scattered throughout Vermis, and in a way it feels like a condensation of their entire career into a single album. Be that as it may, the prevalence of some elements over others are making this album outright annoying to me. I really dig when they go into a section that screams EIF, but they just circle it with inane brutality that's textbook OFAF (only with worse vocals and riffs) and meandering slow sections from TDOA.

Yeah, TDOA was pretty much an album that made me indifferent but this one is actively annoying me in a sense that it reeks of failed realization. It's at the same time an attempt to go back at an earlier style and a step forward, but honestly it actually feels like a roughly patched condensation of their career into a single album. And I must pose the million dollar question then... Have they ran out of ideas?

Maybe I'm being overly judgemental and harsh towards this album, but it really feels wrong in my ears. It's weird that I hadn't any expectations about it and it still managed to make me feel almost betrayed, you know?! Damn...

Am I the only one disliking this album?!

while i do like the album quite a lot, i gotta agree with this
the overall production is very muddy and the drums are too low in the mix
i think the album would be a hell of a lot better if it had the soundscape from the last album

Wut? The drums are perfect on this album. Powerful and natural, and packing a punch without sounding to modern and overpowering. Pumping up the volume of the drums would only result in a headache for everyone involved.

actually yes, you're right - i guess the beer is working... it's not that they aren't loud enough, they just sound very flat (comparing to destroyers, which imo had pretty much the ideal production for ulcerate)

maybe it's just because of the general poor dynamism

*edit* also, my stereo speakers aren't exactly hi-end, so i might have a vastly different opinion after i listen to the album with some decent headphones

I actually said the contrary, that the drums are a bit loud in comparison to the rest. Their sound is muddier than on OFAF though, and while I can concede that this production job was probably done on purpose I can't seem to enjoy it very much.

I guess since I found the drums disgustingly overloud and random on Destroyers, I liked how they were more restrained and less the primary focus. Other than that I just plain disagree with everything Androdion said haha. Other than the slightly weaker vocals I guess. I found the riffs interesting, the songs varied and unique, the slow stuff heavy and tight rather than meandering, the guitar tone the most destructive on the low end they've had, and I found it rich with ideas and.expansions of their sound. Just pure disagreememt it seems. Everything you wrote about Gorguts in your ultra enthusastic glee, I feel about this album.

I suppose the thing you said about both being a revisit to the past and progression is true, it does feel like a return to the dense and intense metal of the past (albiet without the Neurosis style build and release of EiF), while adding in new touches, but I find it very fresh and the execution perfect.

I will forever be the only one who's favourite Ulcerate is The Destroyers of All. Meandering dissonance and ridiculous blasting for life.

I should clarify that none of my aforementioned impressions on the album have by any means been influenced by my love of Colored Sands. Not that you said it but I did mention a comparison in this same thread a while back, with the release dates colliding and all.

I think I may be forever alone in my view of this album. Granted I haven't heard it as much as I could, although the wrong impressions have been so overwhelming that I don't feel like giving Vermis nearly as much time as I gave TDOA. I respect all opinions though, it's just that this album actually disappointed me without me expecting it to do so.

I get that you prefer more restraint on the drums as well, but that goes in line with how I hear the guitars as weak or thin sounding. Even though the drums aren't as prevalent as on TDOA they're still mostly atop the rest. And the bass is mostly absent, and that's a shame.

no, you won't - it's my fav as well

The Destroyers Of All is a decent soundscape album. It's too boring and meandering for me to actively enjoy, but I will certainly listen to it whenever a volcano erupts in front of my house/the inevitable nuclear war starts. This is a good thing though, albums like this have to exist.

I haven't listened to this yet, but I get the feeling that it continues in the direction Destroyers went just based on these reviews. It still seems like EiF is still their Magnum Opus, and they may never achieve that level of balance between riff-madness and ethereal passages like that again. If they're just going to try and re-create EiF 2.0 with every release, that would be a bad thing. If all this progression slowly builds into a new sound for Ulcerate, then I welcome it.

What in the hell gave you that impression? Literally every post has been about how its tighter and less meandering than that album. It isn't EiF 2, but its closer to that than Destroyers.

This, when comparing Vermis to TDOA, is entirely true for me.



I've listened to Everything Is Fire thousands of times as it's one of my favorite albums ever, but so far this has to take the number two spot from Of Fracture And Failure.

That was an odd way to reply.

I've listened to this a few times now, and it's very, very, very good. I agreed earlier in the thread that comparing this to Gorguts' latest would make Vermis look bad, but I have to take that back. This album has exceeded my expectations and then some. I absolutely love it.

I still prefer Colored Sands, I think... only just. I don't know, actually. The albums are similar, yet this one has an entirely different vibe than Colored Sands. I found Colored Sands to have a real sort of mystical/occult feel to it (and it was almost beautiful in spots, if you can call tech-death that), but this album sounds a hell of a lot more twisted. It sounds unhinged.



I honestly haven't been hearing the same album as you, I don't think. The guitars sound massive, and the production sounds pretty stellar to me, especially the lower end. The parts of this album where they slow down and get all doomy and whatnot come across to me like the musical equivalent of a steamroller.

I definitely downloaded the right album, how about you?!

I can't for the life of me understand how you think Vermis and Colored Sands are similar though. And I'm not talking about quality. I mean, they're two completely different templates of songwriting, thus saying the two are similar is kind of weird.

I think I'm going to give it some time again and catch the album at another time, but to be completely frank, and after listening to so much music over the course of my life, I think I've stabilized my taste enough to start trusting more on first impressions. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting in the right mood of the new album being played, but I'm already getting to the point where first impressions become more and more convincing (or less in this particular case).

If I didn't get the right album, then I need to figure out what album I downloaded, because holy shit!

Anyway, yeah I worded that similarity stuff badly, don't worry. I meant genre-wise they're similar, as they're both dissonant, technical death metal, I wasn't meaning the songwriting necessarily. That's why I said immediately after "yet this one has an entirely different vibe than Colored Sands".

That said, while I wasn't referring to this in my previous post, I did hear a few similarities between the two albums in how they're approached the songwriting. Certainly not enough to say that one copied the other, but definitely enough to say that "unless you're Androdion, if you liked Colored Sands you'll probably love this"

Inbound for custom title as "Vermis Hater", ha ha ha.