In the late spring of this year the Belarusian raw black metal band Pa Vesh En released its fourth album Martyrs. Ever-prolific, Pa Vesh En is already returning with a fifth album, this newest one named Catacombs, and it’s being released today by Inferna Profundus Records.
What Pa Vesh En does from album to album is never entirely predictable, but one can predict that whatever variations might be introduced, the results will still be frightening, and so it is with Catacombs.
The dead do seem to call to us in the album opener “Call of the Dead“. They are not at rest, based on the music, but dwell in a realm of torture and despair. Abysmal chords abrade the senses while the drums burst like shells or rumble like subterranean earthquakes, and harrowing voices echo from dank crypts.
Shrill tones swirl and wail in the upper reaches, in contrast with the immense heaviness in the low end, and a guitar slowly writhes in agony while the bass moans like a warped siren.
As a means of starting an album, “Call of the Dead” is dismal and distressing, harrowing yet hallucinatory. In its atmosphere, it’s oppressive and offers no hope, but still proves to be perversely entrancing.
From there, Pa Vesh En forces the listener into ever more terrorizing experiences. “A Moonlight Hunger” shows the other side of the band’s terrors, rendering a convulsive cataclysm of maniacal drumming, frenzied abrasive riffing, and horrific screams — segmented by episodes of towering and heartless menace in which the drums go off like bombs.
In the ensuing nightmare tracks on the album, all of them dynamic in their tempos and sensations, Pa Vesh En continues creating contrasts between the immense undulations and upheavals in the low end, the sandstorm grittiness of the riffing (abrasive but piercing), and the eerie ambient tones that drift and contort in the high-frequency zone.
The drums continue firing with startling, reverberating clarity, rich in their variations (including the tumble-and-boom of a ritualized progression in “Damnation and the Witch” and the rocking grooves in the album closer), and the vocals continue insanely roaring and shrieking, as if recorded in the most hideous torture chambers in Hell. And whether channeling massive earthquakes, detonating with bunker-busting force, or throbbing like a world serpent’s heart, the bass and the bass drum create a constantly humongous presence.
Sometimes the guitars slowly peal like fractured chimes or squirm like wraiths in pain, channeling misery in transfixing ways. You’ll get particularly vivid exposures to that in “Chalice of Blood“, “Entwined With Snakes“, and “Walks With the Dead” — three more songs that become strangely entrancing despite how grievous they are.
But in every song, the band infiltrate piercing melodies of anguish and icy ambient textures within frameworks of destruction that seem capable of slowly shaking or ruthlessly jolting the foundations of your home into catastrophic disrepair.
And so once again, Pa Vesh En offers a distinctive variation on the standard tropes of raw black metal — far heavier than most, far more elaborate, far more frightening, and yet threaded with haunted and heartbreaking melodies of otherworldly origin capable of casting spells (very disturbing spells). Learn this for yourselves through our full stream of the new album below:
Inferna Profundus is releasing the album today on black vinyl and digital formats, and limited edition colored vinyls will be released before year-end and are available for order now.
ORDER:
https://infernaprofundusrecords.bandcamp.com/album/catacombs
https://www.ipr666shop.com/