Vassafor

At about 39 minutes in length this self-titled mini-CD actually is longer than some full-fledged albums I've heard but this in itself may say something about the ambitions and intentions of the New Zealand band Vassafor: the mini-CD is intended to give us a taste of the band's style and scope and so serves as a sampler; at the same time though it's more than just a sampler, it shows us the band means business and anything it undertakes it does so seriously. On the other hand to call a 39-minute recording a mini-CD or an EP instead of an album may reveal a touch of modesty or anxiety on Vassafor's part given that this quartet hails from a small country in the southern hemisphere not exactly world-renowned for its metal scene and often overshadowed by the scene in Australia.

Three of the four tracks are the band's originals, the fourth being a Mercyful Fate cover, and the original songs showcase the band's style as a powerful and crunchy amalgam of black, death and doom metal though not always in an even blend. The musicians play as a tight unit with a crisp and precise style of delivery and no matter how fast they go on the first two songs or how they twist and turn their instruments through various and sometimes alarming changes in pace and rhythm, they do so with a lot of confidence and flair. Opener "Black Winds Victoryant" especially is a strong technical blackened death metal piece with a good cold atmosphere and icy grim vocals and following hard on its heels is "Vassafor" which admits more of a sinister black metal flavour in the spider guitar melody that comes in the intro and at the end of the song. This second song is a mostly chompy black / death one with lots of quivery tremolo guitar and hard tub-thumping rhythms.

The third track "Dreadnaught" is mostly all doom with some black metal influence and hardly any death metal influence and though I'm not a fan of death metal, I can see this song would have benefitted from some death metal influence as it loses some of the momentum built up by the previous songs and its pace is very trundley. The musicians seem to lose focus and direction which a strong death metal influence would have given. The track includes clichéd elements such as a tolling bell towards the end. It sort of collapses and we then segue straight into the Mercyful Fate cover which to me is a fairly ordinary heavy metal song that doesn't offer scope for the musicians to do anything very different from what we have heard on the previous three tracks.

Had Vassafor made "Dreadnaught" more of a death / doom song, varying the pace with a few blastbeat passages and giving it a stronger and more definite ending, this mini-CD would be more consistent and energetic and maybe the Mercyful Fate cover would sound less like an insurance policy and more like the icing on the cake that I think it was meant to be. These guys are mighty ambitious to have their feet planted in three metal genres but it must be no easy feat to try to get the balance among the three just right and consistent so that they can achieve a good synthesis from which a definite Vassafor style can arise. Vassafor have a good strong sound and the atmosphere on this recording is suitably icy so what they need now is find some way of combining their favourite music genres that emphasises the strengths they have.