Predatory Light / Vorde

Predatory Light and Vorde have some shared history with both bands having at least one member who has been a member of or played with fellow USBM band Ash Borer. Members of the two bands have also recently collaborated in a new project, Vanum, playing a more melodic and slightly more old-school black metal style. So it's no surprise - indeed fans of both bands could even have anticipated it - that the two should have joined together to release a limited edition split vinyl album through Psychic Violence Records and Fallen Empire Records.

Predatory Light lead off with two instrumental pieces based around continuously squiggly tremolo guitar melodies that expand into seemingly never-ending torrents of harsh rawness and shrill lead guitar shriek. Percussion gives able support and banshee vocals snarl and howl in the background. The music tends to be quite slow for this style of extremely harsh and blizzard-like music but it does start to speed up considerably in the second track "Death Essence". By the end of PL's side of the split, your head will be going round and round deep in the hellish spirals that the band has charged and drummed up, and it'll be a long, loooong time before you return from the pitch-black universe where you were left.

Vorde boast a much buzzier, faster and more whippy style of music with noisy guitar, constantly clattery cymbals and speed-machine rubbery percussion rhythms and heavy, almost martial beats. The drone singing is deep, booming and inhuman, sounding something like the bizarre offspring of Attila Csihar and Njiqahdda at their bleakest and most dirge-like. The music can be very melodic and atmospheric in an experimental, almost deconstructive way, as though Vorde were forcing particular riffs and melodies, and playing with mood and emotion, to their utmost extremes. The result can be a sudden realisation or a new awareness of another level of conscious being that until now was unknown and unknowable. If the first of the two Vorde tracks is weird, the second (and shorter) track is stranger still and even more deranged, with tribal rhythms, a dark hellish psychedelic guitar howl and an angry growling vocal leading listeners into a deep realm of restless guitar noise, spasms of stuttery machine-drumming, anguished yell and black emptiness.

Both bands push instrumental BM to extreme levels: Predatory Light's side is very hypnotic but Vorde have the edge in deliriously demented, insane avant-garde industrial blackness. Your biggest problem with this split vinyl release is in deciding which side to play first as both acts' music will rearrange your brain cell structures and networks into something resembling primoridal protoplasm and you'd need another 500 million years' worth of evolution to return to a state where you can listen to the other side. Most of us (and maybe the planet Earth itself) cannot afford all that time so I'll make it easy and recommend you hear Vorde first.