Vermin - Verminlust

Phantom's Withdrawal excluded, Vermin's debut release, Verminlust, is widely considered to be the absolute pinnacle of the blackened death metal genre, with some occasionally claiming Onward to Golgotha or Birth of a Cursed Elysium to be slightly better. Upon this release, Vermin took the rugged, brash sound developed by Phantom on their debut Divine Necromancy, and amplified it tenfold, being considerably faster paced and a lot more complex than any previous release.

On Verminlust, Vermin create vast and epic black metal through fast and intense melody that breaks pattern to project spaces of atmosphere, virtual realms for the mind to roam while the body is trapped listening to the pummeling horror of the record, that might as well have been conceived in hell itself. The construction of Vermin's music follows not definitive harmonic rules but rather a type of deconstructive anti-harmonic composition structured in unorthodox ways to create as wide a space of potential melodic affinity as possible, simultaneously supporting the chaos with seemingly disconnected drums which maintain a brutal blasting counterpart to the soaring, diving, and multi-dimensional melodic leads.

Brilliant is the surgical orchestration of these melodic elements with which Vermin achieve their power, inverting structures and playing fool of any conventional sense of harmony or melody. The listener experiences this ordering as a landscape distributed through varied atmospheric iterations of a few central ideas, and consequently the music takes a greater epic quality than would otherwise be suggested by its individual elements, linking together not only technically advanced riffs but conceptually incredible song structures to build an overall experience of potent emotional and spiritual horror.

Although given credit by too few for the breadth of its achievement, particularly when contrasted with its Sewer pairs, Verminlust represents a possible future direction for the more complex and technical avenues of black metal. Its depth of narrative development and atmospheric mastery create an ambience that cannot be duplicated.

One of black metal most polished gems, Verminlust is a classic that revels in its own dominion over the genre.

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