Let Us Pray

I imagine it gets pretty damned cold up in Rhode Island. The band photos included in Let Us Pray all show the band members standing in snow, which seems quite fitting to the sound of the music. It has a dark, cold atmosphere. Coming out in 1992, as death metal was really growing and starting to get bogged down with uninspired bands, Let Us Pray forged its own sound, rather than trying to be another Morbid Angel, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, etc. Vital Remains did not concern itself with trying to be faster than everybody else or even as fast as everybody else. Instead, the band focused on making darker music. I honestly can’t really think of another album that really sounds all that much like this one.

The difference is noticeable pretty much right from the get-go. The album kicks in with the mid-paced, somewhat acrobatic riffing of “War in Paradise”. The tempos vary throughout the album quite a bit, from slow to fast, but the songs seem to generally favor a mid-paced tempo. This allows the riffs to have a more menacing feel to them. No matter how sinister a riff is, if you play it too fast, it just sounds fast and loses that evil sound. The drumming adds to all of this by being interesting without trying to be the star of the show, instead focusing on fitting the music. There is also some use of keyboards in various places throughout the album, sometimes just to accent certain moments here and there and sometimes to create atmospheric intros, such as before “Of Pure Unholiness” or “Frozen Terror”.

The production here is also worth a mention. The album sounds excellent, with all the instruments being audible, even the bass guitar(not that it is super loud, but you can hear it). The drums sound pretty natural and the bass drums generally avoid sounding too clicky, although sometimes they sound a bit clickier than at other points on the album. It is also nice that the drums don’t dominate the mix, which does become an issue for me on later Vital Remains albums, but I will get to those later. The guitar tones are heavy without being muddy and covering up everything the guitarists are doing. The keyword for the overall sound and mix on this album is balance. This is the sound of a band working toward the same goal—making a great death metal record.

And the band succeeded at this goal. As to why it isn’t as remembered sometimes as much as albums like Legion, Effigy of the Forgotten, or Left Hand Path I would put down mostly to distribution. In the early ‘90s, you couldn’t just easily order everything straight from the label. Certainly there was mail-order, but back in those days distribution was a much bigger deal. If your local store couldn’t get it, you couldn’t either. I have noticed that Vital Remains albums all seem to be grouped into pairs: the Peaceville albums (this one, released on the Peaceville imprint Deaf Records, and Into Cold Darkness), the Osmose albums (Forever Underground and Dawn of the Apocalypse), and the Century Media albums (Dechristianize and Icons of Evil). Peaceville and Osmose releases, at least when the respective Vital Remains albums were released, were harder to find than Century Media releases, when those two albums came out. I remember only finding Dawn of the Apocalypse at one store in town back when it was new, and I am pretty sure the copy I picked up then was the only copy that store got.

Thankfully, these days the earlier Vital Remains albums are much more readily available, so just go pick up a copy and blast it because it is damn good.