Vi Sonus Veris Nigrae Malitiaes

Enough already. Abruptum's approach to black metal (if their music can be called that) was refreshingly unique and menacingly sinister on their debut album. Something of sheer morbid intensity that had never been done before. Then the second album came along and made it painfully clear that its uniqueness was a primary factor for why the debut worked as well as it did, because said sophomore effort did pretty much the exact same thing all over again, and with the novelty value out the window it ended up accomplishing pretty much nothing at all. However, I guess It disagrees with me on that one, because guess what followed the second album...

Yep, the exact same thing AGAIN, for a third time, presented in an even more pointless way than its predecessor. And the biggest problem isn't that only the listener gets bored by Abruptum milking the same novelty idea over and over again, the band - in this case just It alone - seems to have become bored with it, because while there was at least some effort involved in the first two albums (the first one far more so than the second) this is pretty much as half-assed as it gets when it comes to duplicating the previously successful Abruptum formula.

The main ingredients are the same. Random percussion, a few ghost train effects and outbursts of chaotic background noise here and there, doomy detuned and likely improvised guitars and vocals alternating between screaming and wailing, complimented by occasional whispery growls. Doesn't sound like much, but for the debut album it worked, definitely very gloomy, to the point of being creepy. On here it does nothing at all. It's like if you want to make a sequel to a splatter flick, you got to know that fans of the first one are going to be pretty desensitized to the level of gore seen in the first one, so you got to try to make the sequel even more disgusting. Imagine a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust in which the worst splatter effect is a woman cutting herself in the finger while peeling an apple. That's pretty much what this album does. The vocals are more shy than before, for one. The background noise is quieter. The percussion is less climactic and past the point of just being random - it's completely irrelevant to anything else going on. And last and definitely not least, the guitars are far more sparse. It's like Diet Abruptum™...

Pointless, pointless, pointless.

Just avoid this one.