Deeper than Sky

Vhol aren't really the most extreme band you'll find on the metal spectrum, but there's a certain ferality and hunger about Deeper Than Sky that's wholly unique to this work. To me this album evokes some sort of end-of-days creature, a cretin prowling a ruined city scavenging for food. There's a kind of electric, crackling energy in every thrashy riff and every hard-hitting punk-style drum beat and every hooligan-shout of the vocals, and the whole thing goes by you in a blur of thrashing limbs and violent chaos and primal screams – it's over so quick you may just need to hit 'Play' again after the last note of “The Tomb.”

Despite its ferality, this is a very eclectic, musical album that plays a lot of more subtle tricks that I liked more the more I played it. It's sort of thrash metal, but with hints of blasting black metal and even some more melodic moments that lend the album a proggy feel here and there. The riffs are relentlessly fast and cutting, and the guitar tone is bright and crisp enough that you can hear every inch of this as it cuts into your flesh like a fucking saw blade. The vocals are a harsh, animalistic shout, barely controlled, sometimes going into more of a sneering whine – I like the raw unhinged nature of the vocals here, as they don't just stick to one style, and the crazed, random-feeling variation lends this a sense of the unpredictable.

Vhol is a John Cobbett project, and him and bass-player Sigrid Sheie throw in tons of twists and turns with the songwriting as expected. The Dragonforce-y licks on opener “The Desolate Damned” quickly turn into mean, vitriolic punk-thrash mayhem, and “3 AM” is a D-beat hardcore song with metal riffs spliced in like back-alley surgery. “Paino” is worthy of note as a short little ditty that has classy 50s-bar-style piano runs in between the jaunty riffs, and it's a great song. More extreme bands should play around with different instrumentation like this. The light and shade of the textured melodies on the eight-minute “Lightless Sun” are seriously cool – what a great, ambitious epic. These songs all start off kicking and thrashing and end with no bullshit about them. They get their business done and they leave. More bands should cut the fat and trim their albums down like this – many could learn a lesson from Vhol on this.

It's the title track that takes the cake for best song, though – this huge 12-minute multi-part epic, all riffs and bravado, taking the listener on this sort of cosmic, adventurous journey with a ton of ideas and riff changes and moods. It's an old school metal epic and always has something cool going on. The band just isn't content to have even a moment of the music that isn't grabbing for your attention. The number of Grade-A riffs that Cobbett and co. have put into this song is amazing, and the structure is unlike anything else out there. Cobbett is a true original and knows what's cool about metal guitar and metal songwriting, and he exploits the fuck out of that on this whole album.

Deeper Than Sky is a fucking cool metal album, and with its blend of genres and bucking of conventional tropes, it's exactly what I find so cool about modern metal these days. This is metal made by metalheads, for metalheads. If you like weird, awesome underground music, this is a pure creation of love and passion and you'll dig the fuck out of it.