(As you can see, we have a song premiere, but first, an album review.)
After listening to parts of Venomous Echoes‘ 2023 debut album, Writhing Tomb Amongst the Stars, this writer immediately spewed forth words while my mind was still boggled, among them such adjectives as “maniacal”, “freakish”, “insane”, and “demented”, and referenced the conjunction of “full-tilt demolition in the low end and spell-like alien wailings that seem to reach our shores from deep space”.
I also quoted a friend’s impressions: “If Choir meets Portal and Impetuous Ritual in Strapping Young Lad’s City is in your wheelhouse you can’t go wrong with this onslaught brought to you by Benjamin Vanweelden.”
Upon learning that Mr. Vanweelden had had recorded a second Venomous Echoes album that I, Voidhanger Records would be releasing this spring, I already knew that I would have to hear it, and that I would have to make sure before listening that I wouldn’t need my brain to function in even its usually disjointed condition for several hours afterward. No great shock to see that the album’s name is Split Formations And Infinite Mania.
Well, now I’ve listened, and I find myself in shuddering but exhilarated agreement with the label’s summing up of the new album as “an intimate and personal experience into a universal cosmic horror apocalypse”.
Whatever internal tortures produced the vocals on the first album have found no balm. Those sounds are still terrifying, the screams shattering, the guttural growls grotesque, the cries tormented, and the transitions between them instantaneous.
The music is also terrorizing, still maniacal not only in the extremity of its violence but also in the suddenness of the changes through which its nightmare visions take hideous shape in sound.
Venomous Echoes peppers many of the tracks with catastrophic detonations and depth-charge rhythms, the kind of periodic grooves that cause bowels to void themselves. In between those segments, massive forces tunnel through bedrock, spewing boulders behind, and crazed guitar or keyboard emanations writhe and scream in the upper reaches, trading places with the whir of dismal moaning tones down below. The music also sometimes lurches like a hungry hulking beast.
Tempos change without warning. Wailing solos frantically spiral into the skies. Fingers dance about the frets like highly accelerated alien spiders. Eerie swirls of sound insinuate themselves through convulsions of pulverizing brutality.
This time, however, Venomous Echoes injects even more surprises than before. Brief piano melodies beautifully ripple, and harpsichord-like keys devilishly dance. Brittle strummed chords bespeak sorrow as the beats amble and skip. Mangling harsh noise mangles, as ghost-voices echo. Muttered words, deep demonic gasps, distorted cacophonies, and almost-singing create fear and hopelessness in other ways.
Symphonic blasts generate visions of horrid grandeur. The guitars mutate, twisting in on themselves to create chilling sonic hallucinations as the snare rattles at hyperspeed. The music slowly collapses into sinkholes of emotional desolation and soars like the last sunrise life on earth will ever see.
All moods are dark, but dark in different ways, as the songs channel lethal madness, flesh-flensing pain, deplorable degradation, deepest agony, deepest grief. No comfort zones are afforded here, only a fiendishly ingenious gauntlet to be run.
It’s all astonishing, in part because the music (and all those dark moods) are so viscerally harrowing, in part because it’s often so technically jaw-dropping in its execution, in part because its non-stop twists and turns are so intricate and unpredictable, spanning a range from the primitive and brutish to the wildly spectacular, with all manner of horrors in between.
Of course this album isn’t for everyone — what is? — but for those who’ll be captivated by it, you may find it has no equal this year.
I, Voidhanger hints at what fueled the album, referring to Ben Vanweelden‘s focus “on his own body dysmorphia and the psychological implications”:
“The body is a prison, a space tomb that is both a place of torture and a portal to other dimensions, as sinister and unsettling as 0ndes’ cover drawing. Dismemberment, decomposition and recomposition are like alchemical phases in a grotesque process of metamorphosis….”
And with that, we’ll now turn you over to the song from the album we’re premiering today — the album-opener “Ocular Maltosis ov Schizophrenia” — presented in a player that will also let you hear two other songs, “Miscreated Pustules” and “Mucous Slathered Face Morphed into Tsathoggua“.
I, Voidhanger Records will release Split Formations And Infinite Mania on April 5th, on LP vinyl, CD, and digital formats. The album comes recommended for fans of Morbid Angel, Howls Of Ebb, Esoctrilihum, Portal, Ulthar.
PRE-ORDER:
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/split-formations-and-infinite-mania
https://metalodyssey.8merch.com/
https://metalodyssey.8merch.us/