VALE OF PNATH: “BETWEEN THE WORLDS OF LIFE AND DEATH”

(On May 24th Willowtip Records released a new album by the U.S. metal band Veil of Pnath. As is usually the case, DGR didn’t rush to prepare an early review but allowed the music to linger a while. Now his review is finished and available below.)

Vale Of Pnath are of a class of tech-death groups that never seemed to fully get their due. The Denver-based crew made themselves known at the right time, had the right scratchy logo, and had the right high-speed playing style to prominently place themselves in the world of the initial tech-death explosion as it quickly codified into its own subgenre rather than just a way to describe a much more complicated style of death metal that is more well-known for caveman slamming into the ground repeatedly.

Guitarist Vance Valenzuela is the only long-time member of the group still standing at this point, having been surrounded by a legion of incredibly talented musicians over the years. Maybe it was the ever-shifting nature of the group that was to blame? Maybe the revolving-door list of who would be in the lineup at any album? Maybe it was the sense that Vale Of Pnath was a machine, not just in the precision of their playing but in ‘parts’ changing themselves out, or maybe it was just the tad too long gaps between releases?

Regardless, it never seemed like Vale Of Pnath were fully able to achieve the relentless touring and constant social media renown as well as many of their fellow classmates did, despite having the body of material to back that up.

Or maybe it’s because Vale Of Pnath have always been something of a chameleon of a band, with colors and patterns changing so constantly that no one has ever been particularly sure what the musical Vale Of Pnath comprises other than their previously described ‘scene’. With the incredible smorgasbord of talent available to the group over the years, so too has the band’s style changed, with their tech-death core being the star around which everything else orbited.

Which brings us to the group’s late-May release of Between The Worlds Of Life And Death, an album that sees the band with one of their longest gaps in the release schedule yet – eight years if you’re the type to only count full-lengths, five years if you’re counting the ‘is it or is it not’ an EP Accursed in 2019 – but also once again with a newly recharged lineup that counts among its ranks the Abigail Williams crew – Ken Sorceron taking up the vocals position (as well as bass and some guitar performances) and journeyman titanium-backboned drummer Gabe Seeber now sitting behind the kit – and new bassist Austin Rolla as of 2023 (it seems he didn’t record bass on the new album).

As you might expect, with new names comes new inspiration, new album art style, and once again a new sound for Vale Of Pnath. 2019’s Accursed may have already been leaning toward the dark and apocalyptic; Between The Worlds Of Life And Death takes it one step further, amplifying every single degree of that EP, adding a dash of symphonic backing, and dragging things by their necks even further along those lines.

Even though there are stark differences between the two releases, Accursed and Between The Worlds Of Life And Death have a handful of similarities as well. Chief among them is actually the pacing, wherein Vale Of Pnath break up their songs with intro track and interludes. You could look at the Accursed EP as being a proto-version of Between The Worlds Of Life And Death in that aspect. A surprising difference, though, is that the second instrumental for Vale Of Pnath’s newest full length appears before the album’s final song – as if to signal to listeners ‘this batch of songs is done, here’s one final out-of-nowhere track to catch you flat-footed’.

It probably doesn’t come as a complete surprise then, as Vale Of Pnath tumble further down the rabbit hole into a realm of black metal, symphonic death, and tech-death hybridization, that they might’ve created both a new album but also an accidental time capsule, because Between The Worlds Of Life And Death sometimes picks you up like a baseball and fastball-pitches so far backward in time that you land in a heap right at the crossroads of earlier Abigail Williams material.

Vale Of Pnath‘s lineup is effectively the modern-day Abigail Williams lineup and it’s easy to see how that sort of transition can cause bleedthrough, with influences crossing and lines blurring. It’s like watching two planets finally align after having spent decades missing each other, and the final resulting circle is what could be called the newest Vale Of Pnath album. It’s either a severe hybridization that modernizes a previous sound or the resurrection of an idea that was just slightly ahead of its time before some pretty serious spike-and-nail gauntlets found their way into the musical fray.

There is a sort of freewheeling madness to Between The Worlds Of Life And Death, wherein each element of the album both seems to clash and co-exist at the same time. Notwithstanding the occasional jarring transition in some of the earlier songs on this album, most of the release is buttery smooth and played with a relentless precision, allowing for the sort of high-speed theatrics you might expect from the genre as a whole.

Orchestral backing will have swells to them that are big enough to surf on within certain songs, and other tracks make way for vocalist Ken Sorceron to deliver words with a snarling and rapid-fire aplomb. If you hadn’t heard his turn in 2017’s In Becoming A Ghost by The Faceless, it would be a welcome return for an artist who has made plenty of headway in the world of shrieking howls and ghostly yells.

Vale Of Pnath cast themselves in the musical mad scientist role, stitching together an avalanche of guitar riffs, blasting drums, and a rumbling rhythm section that hangs on white-knuckled for most of the songs here, accompanied by backing symphonic work that does a solid job reinforcing a sturdy musical frame. The first four-to-five songs on Between The Worlds Of Life And Death have a real good knack for carving their way into your skull, even if it seems like there’s bits and pieces where you aren’t sure which belongs to which, given the rapid pneumatic nailer approach to the early few songs in Vale Of Pnath‘s latest musical adventure.

Between The Worlds Of Life And Death places Vale Of Pnath in an exciting and interesting place. It’s a strong album that is full of the fretboard fireworks that’ve become expected from the tech-death genre, but amplified by a heavy focus on atmospheric works and blackened death metal influence. Just the act of letting those ideas slowly work their way along the fringes only to finally congeal into one tangible monster on this latest album has been the one consistent and underlying throughline for Vale Of Pnath, even as the band roster slowly acheives Obscura-status in lineup shifting.

As every album has been an offering of something different, so too has every release for Vale Of Pnath felt like a new launch for the band. Each time they’ve always had strong enough material to propel them stratospheric and this one is no different, both perfectly in line with the current genre and also stubbornly just off the beaten path while their cohorts play around in the sandboxes of masked and electronic faux-nu-metal (don’t get me wrong, the heavy bludgeoning groove is very fun and it works like a charm) or the low-and-slow bruiser approach.

They’re a quicker-tempoed entity with mass-delusions of grandeur on Between The Worlds Of Life And Death, but one that strikes with such surgical precision and quick get-in, blow up room, get-out approach to songwriting that save for the demented circus funhouse of disparate elements that is the final song, you could easily give Between The Worlds Of Life And Death the symphonic death avalanche tag and be plenty content.

https://valeofpnath.bandcamp.com/album/between-the-worlds-of-life-and-death
https://www.facebook.com/ValeOfPnathCO/