The World Trapped in Vampyric Sway (Darker and Darker)

Since releasing the modestly titled "Satanic Elite" demo back in 2015, the horde known as Unholy Vampyric Slaughter Sect, with sole member Kane as sect leader (well, he has to be if there's only one member!), has unleashed a flood of (mostly) singles, EPs and split recordings plus three albums onto the world. With most of the world trapped in COVID-19 pandemic sway, third album "The World Trapped in Vampyric Sway (Darker and Darker)" is aptly titled. Just as we are forced to face a virus that may very well have been hyped up by sinister hidden forces to instil shock and fear and compliance with laws turning cities, regions and entire nations into police-state lock-down, so also this album demands no less than total surrender from listeners to its brand of extreme and hyper-aggressive raw black metal. As time passes, the planet under pandemic lock-down faces an increasingly uncertain and dark future; the album doesn't deliver quite that level of sustained fear without end but it is truly intense in its aggression and ferocity, and the few quiet moments that appear between blasts of brutal BM savagery become all the more eerie and anxiety-inducing.

Opening track "To Love Nothing but the Loss of One's Enemy" - what a blunt statement of the UVSS agenda we have here - goes on full-attack rampaging mode with fast and furious tremolo guitar scrabble, a battery of jagged crunching riffs and hard-hitting percussion. Spectral harsh ghost vocals screech and shout in the background. With very little pause for rest, UVSS shoots straight into the next track "Pummeled Flesh in the Mouth of the Virgin", a slightly deeper, slower and more sinister track with hard driving guitar grind and a bonkers ghostly middle section of ritual spirit chant that truly sends icy cold shivers up and down the spine. The album keeps going at a faster and harder thudding pace transiting into melodic head-banging riff-chugging tech death metal swank with the third track "Forced Genuflection on Adoring Gored Knees".

As the album continues, the hidden game plan becomes apparent: for all its apparent full-on raw BM approach, UVSS delight in confounding listeners by sneaking in passages of experimental electronic ambient noise into all tracks, whether it's an electronic pulse beat in the middle of "Pummeled Flesh ...", samples of deadpan spoken-voice dialogue in "To Love Nothing ..." or the glacially creepy introduction to "And I Shall Come to Thee as an Iron Wolf". These breakages of experimentalism into what otherwise would have been straight-out deranged melodic blackened death suggest the parallel existence of an insidious universe alongside ours, that extends wormhole tendrils into our plane of existence to hold listeners in thrall while they quietly suck the life-force of our universe into theirs. With these passages of experimentation, the songs become even more demented and intense, even with all that barrage of grinding noisy guitar crunch terror and the nuclear-powered blast-beat percussion.

No point really in trying to pull apart the album or UVSS's style of music to figure out the most frightening moments of the recording or what is the deadliest weapon in this vampyre horde's arsenal ... all the songs are absolutely brutal in their sound, speed, energy and sheer attitude, and Kane plays all his instruments as though Fate decreed at his birth that he should be a psychotic serial axe murderer ... but for some reason (which we ought to be grateful for) he took up shredding axes to deaths of fine dust and tiny bits of steel string. The screechy singing across all tracks is probably unnecessary and fights for listener attention at times ... all the same, it does add another layer of extreme madness to the music.

Prepare to be pounded over and over into the ground unmercifully by the riff grind or the industrial blunt force trauma of the synth drums ... or just get the heck out of the way of UVSS!