Vrondor I: Epitaph of Mass-Destruction

This is an interesting debut album by the Belgian black metal band Thronum Vrondor. These guys produce a very deep bass-heavy music with juddering tremolo guitars as you'd expect at a usually fast and occasionally slow-ish pace. Most songs on this recording (there are 5 tracks altogether) have passages of death metal-styled throbbing drumming along with the natural drumming and blastbeats. Apart from the first and last tracks which have extended melodic intros, the music isn't especially melodic; the musicians concentrate on building up really beefy and solid minimalist BM sound and hellish atmosphere, and even when they introduce lead guitar, it's still very vibrato and usually follows the rhythms of the music closely.

The vocals can sound quite distant in the mix and in nearly all songs there are two sets of vocals, one set being distorted BM vocals and then there is a cleaner-sounding but still very rough set of vocals reminiscent of USBM vocalist Imperial (ex-Krieg, currently of N.I.L.) especially in those parts where the raucous singing becomes yowling and shouting. The lyrics are apocalyptic as might be expected of an album called "Epitaph of Mass Destruction" and the imagery conjured up in songs like "A Cleansing in Fire" and "Through Tomb and Ashes" is extremely vivid as the planet Earth is finally rid forever of its plague of humans in never-ending fires sent from the sky. (So, OK, it's the Big Guy In The Sky who's meting out the deserved punishment, not His Pal in Hell below.)

Of the 5 tracks on offer, the ones that stand most are "Miscreations ? Ill-Created" and "For Death ..." for their intros: "For Death ..." has some really good fluttering balalaika-style lead guitar playing; and "Miscreations ..." has a highly atmospheric and plaintive clean guitar intro that drops you straight into the roiling, boiling BM storm which later on has some very subtle ambient effects that can be easily missed in this long track. The sound throughout this track and the rest of the album can be powerful, even epic, and there's a raw edge, particularly in the singing, though the recording quality is clear enough with just a hint of echo. The second and third tracks don't seem all that remarkable but are pretty speedy and the fourth track, "Through Tomb and Ashes", varies more in speed and rhythm, going from fast to medium-fast and even to near-funereal slow and back again.

Perhaps this isn't the most original album of its kind but it's a solid effort for a debut. TV's most outstanding characteristics are the two sets of vocals in most songs and the distinctive lead guitar that flutters, often in a high-pitched way, throughout the album. The concept of the album demands that you listen to the whole recording all the way through, though of course some songs can be cherry-picked if you like them, and at 39 minutes in length, the album readily lends itself to being heard in one sitting.