We have one hell of a ferocious and frightening video for you today from the death metal band Ferum for a song off their 2022 debut album Asunder / Erode. It’s a thrilling experience to watch and hear all by itself, but also a timely reminder of what this part-Italian, part-Estonian trio accomplished on that record.
The album is one we had the pleasure of reviewing and premiering here last August, shortly before its release by the Unorthodox Emanations division of Avantgarde Music. If you happened to see the cover art by Paolo Girardi (one of his most hideous creations), we wager that you haven’t forgotten it (it’s down near the bottom of this article, just in case). And if you heard the album, we wager you haven’t forgotten it either.
For those who might have missed out on Asunder / Erode, we’ll share a few of our comments about it later in this feature, but now let’s get right to the new video.
The song in the short film is “Desolate Vantaa“, and Ferum introduce the video with these words:
Ferum‘s new music video is a minimalist tale about escapism, forgetfulness and resistance. It was shot in 2 of the most fascinating landscapes of urban abandonment in Estonia: the majestic Linnahall arena in Tallinn and the abandoned Radio Station in Laitse.
As the story unfolds, we see the musicians engaged in an intersubjective act of mortality and dissolution, haunted by a masked entity that objectifies the feeling of asphyxiation.
The sequences are raw and symbolic. The external watcher is called to experience the primitive instincts of survival and to elaborate his/her own interpretation of the story.
The only constant is the unescapable desolation.
The music of “Desolate Vantaa“, and the video for it, feature singer, guitarist and songwriter Samantha Alessi , bassist Matteo Anzelini, and drummer Are Kangus. As they throw themselves into the performance, the music stomps like a hulking brute and convulses in frenzied fretwork bursts as Samantha expels the words in guttural growls with teeth bared. But the band also bring down the suffocating mantle of doom, dragging and clawing their way forward, oozing fetid chords and freakish wails of misery.
Back and forth they go, creating sensations that are primitive and preternatural. They punch the pulse, slog through ghastly pits of choking blackness, and send out swirling and screaming solo work that adds to both the song’s supernatural aura and its moods of harrowing hopelessness.
That will give newcomers to Ferum a great introduction to Asunder / Erode. And by way of further introduction, we’ll now repeat some of what we wrote about the album last August:
True to the record’s cover art, the music on Asunder / Erode is morbid and gruesome, creating an atmosphere of oppression and horror. The riffs channel menace and madness, backed by the work of a rhythm section that seems intent on punching straight through your body’s core and reveling in the gore that will come out the other side. Samantha‘s voice adds to the music’s ghastly aura, through guttural and gagging roars that rise into insane screams.
Those riffs also turn out to be insidiously infectious, even though they’re disturbing, and although the band live up to their doom-influenced moniker through funereal pacing, crushing grooves, and melodies of misery, hopelessness, and decay, you won’t forget why they chose the name for themselves they did: They’re equally capable of injecting their lumbering musical beast with adrenaline, causing it to leap and bound, to attack and ferociously rampage.
The band continually and dramatically change the tempos and the moods, veering from passages of ruinous affliction and inconsolable anguish to powerful slug-fests that will get heads banging, as well as immersion in vats of congealing blood and boiling viscera.
Some things don’t change, however: The rumbling, stalking, and battering drums are always bone-cracking in their force, the bass lines remain bowel-loosening; the vocals sound voracious, noxious, and lethally insane; the guitar harmonies manipulate the listeners’ moods with aplomb; and the soloing channels sickness, despair, and derangement with skull-piercing intensity.
But of course you don’t really need our words anymore, because the album is available to stream in full, and we’ll make that easy for you to do. Asunder/Erode is recommended for fans of Cyanide, Temple of Void, and Coffins, and you can pick it up via the links below.
BUY:
https://www.sound-cave.com/en/band/ferum
https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/asunder-erode
FOLLOW:
https://www.facebook.com/ferumdeath
https://www.instagram.com/ferum_death/