Vermine

"Vermine" is the debut album from the French black metal act Sotherion. Sébastien Tuvi (a.k.a. BST), the only member of the project, slightly took his fans aback, at least those who pinned their hopes on him to create one more modernist dissonant/atonal horde in the spirit of Aosoth, – admittedly, although BST's work history is significant, he is best known for his guitar work in this remarkable band. Well, apparently, VI as well as The Order of Apollyon are enough now for BST to complete this mission (i. e. dissonant modernity), so he did not have to muster all his courage in order to take a stylistic step back with Sotherion. The point is that although "Vermine" really keeps a quite strong Aosoth vibe, by and large this album is an amalgam of Aosoth and "A Blaze in the Northern Sky"-era Darkthrone.

Beyond all doubt, the result sounds very piercing and old school. But "A Blaze in the Northern Sky" is not "Transilvanian Hunger" at all, so the music on "Vermine" has few interesting and captivating melodies in full accordance with the comparative description. Rather, we are faced here with a continuous tough atmosphere, the emotional opposite of what usually associated with atmospheric black metal. Pumping up the psychically aggressive atmosphere reaches its climax when the same riff with a slight dissonance is repeated over and over. Oh yes, this is Aosoth in all its glory.

"Flame of Deliverance" with its long tremolo picking part, collapsing at the end into atonality, can be considered as one of the most Aosoth-esque songs on "Vermine", even though it contains an episode with typical Darkthronish groove with howls at the end of the riff (that is, generally speaking, already a Celtic Frost touch, those howls are just generated with a slight atonality). "Famished King" is also in the spirit of Aosoth with its atonal riffs over non-Darkthronish blast-beat drumming. In turn, "Blood Prophet" can be described as the most retro piece.

It is clear that the described hypnotizing cyclicism/hyperfixation occurs, fortunately, more than once on "Vermine", but in general it would not hurt to do more modernistic invasions. Too often we have to be content with having to, so to speak, pluck out pieces of Aosoth from Darkthrone. The subtlety is that even when we get obvious Aosoth-esque riffs, both the guitar sound and the doublebass-attack à la Darkthrone steal all the attention, as a result we are left with nothing.

However, BST honestly warned his fans what to expect from "Vermine" by offering us the "Schwarmgeist" demo two years ago. "Vermine" even contains both songs from "Schwarmgeist" at its end, just in reverse order. If regarding "Shrine of the Chosen" we can still assume that this is an updated version (ah, a short episode of singing in a clean voice on the background, unfortunately, was deleted), then "Schwarmgeist" received almost no changes, with the exception of guitar passage on the right channel at the end of the composition, which became either pretty restrained in the mix or was removed totally. This is also a regrettable loss: the guitar with its whistle carried some abnormal melodism, almost on the verge of power electronics. In addition, "Schwarmgeist" feels to be drawn out on the album.

Just like the demo, the album has the close to raw production value, i. e., generally speaking, the sound is crappy. Production-wise, there is not that much of a difference between the releases, the guitar is muddy on both "Schwarmgeist" and "Vermine", except that the sound on the album is denser and lower, it is not so sharp, although just as abrasive.

The tempo of the album is spread almost evenly between blast-beat drumming and a mid-tempo groove. In almost every song we have a move in which a tremolo picking melody, more or less piercing, dominates the slowdown. That is, generally speaking, the songs structure does not shine with variety. The (rather) low-pitched vocals are squashed in the mix with guitars, but this does not create any listening difficulties.

Summary. Maybe "Vermine" should be regarded as an attempt to revive true black metal with new elements. This is a holiday more for old school fans than for Aosoth fans. The latter may even be disappointed. It can be said that Sotherion is a kind of ("true") antipode of Mork/Udåd, although the purpose of the projects is, in principle, the same.