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Vaabnet play black metal metal in a style that only has developed in the last 5 or so years. While it is not a huge innovation at first glance, this micro niche of punked(usually of the crust sort) up black metal eventually reveals itself as being a bit different. Some more established bands in this style would be for example Unru, Turia or Dakhma. In this fairly raw style of black metal the riffs are usually somewhat melodic in the Darkthrone style. Tremolo picked crust punk riffs are not a rarity. These bands also display elements from the Cascadian black metal sound albeit without the post-rock or shoegaze parts, instead they take the focus on atmosphere and tendency to write long songs. Vaabnet actually are a bit less crusty than usual for this micro niche and seem to have a trace or two from more folkish black metal bands. I found myself thinking of their country mates Angantyr for example.

This demo is quite mature, the band plays tight enough and the song-writing is quite well thought out. One thing that surprised me is how densely packed the songs are, all the songs save for one are under 3 minutes long, quite a few bands in this micro niche would have the same amount of ideas in songs several times as long. Personally I consider this rather refreshing as black metal bands seem to have forgotten the art of writing short well thought out songs. The fact that none of these ideas are bad helps too.

At first I thought this was just another band in this rapidly crowding micro niche of black metal. However after playing this demo several times I realised that Vaabnet do have their own take on this style of black metal. While the band is nothing more than solid on this demo, they very well might create something quite potent in the future.