Oakland death metal outfit VASTUM is preparing for the release of their gnarled fourth album, Orificial Purge. Ahead of the album’s public unveiling through 20 Buck Spin at the end of October, the new single “I On The Knife (Second Wound)” has been issued.
With lead vocalist Daniel Butler, guitarist/vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf, guitarist Shelby Lermo, bassist Luca Indrio, and drummer Chad Gailey, Ryan Honaker provides guest strings on VASTUM‘s Orificial Purge, and Honaker and Abdul-Rauf also help shape the album with elements of ambience. Recorded with Greg Wilkinson (Necrot, Nightfell, Ulthar) at Earhammer Studios and visually represented by the brooding abstraction of San Francisco artist Laina Terpstra, VASTUM’s Orificial Purge is one of the year’s most vicious and hypnotic LPs. Fans of Bolt Thrower, Undergang, Autopsy, Necrot, Asphyx, Mortuous, Tomb Mold, and Scorched are orificially summoned to take note.
Vocalist Daniel Butler exposes of the track’s lyrical content, “‘I On The Knife’ is about psychophysical self-mutilation under the command of a thing, an it, which is gradually symbolized as an object (e.g. father, knife) that in turn reveals the self as a wound. Basically, it’s about how you’re a wound and nothing else.”
Guitarist/vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf offers, “We felt this song – along with initial single, ‘Reveries In Autophagia’ – was the most representative of the classic VASTUM sound.”
Hear VASTUM’s “I On The Knife (Second Wound) at THIS LOCATION or below:
20 Buck Spin will issue Orificial Purge on CD, LP, cassette, and all digital platforms on October 25th. Preorders go live this week at the label webshop HERE and at Bandcamp where “Reveries In Autophagia” is now streaming HERE.
Guitar World just ran a feature on the 25 Best Metal Guitar Tones Of All Time where VASTUM‘s Leila Abdul-Rauf was featured alongside the likes of Black Sabbath, Slayer, Metallica, Entombed, Meshuggah, Danzig, Sunn O))), and more. See the piece HERE.
Having just made their return to Killtown Death Fest 2019 in Copenhagen alongside Grave, Coffins, Abhorrence, Tomb Mold, and many others in September, VASTUM has also been confirmed to play the inaugural Shadow Frost Music & Arts Festival taking over Frederick, Maryland February 21st and 22nd, 2020. The band joins The Chasm, Primitive Man, Thantifaxath, and labelmates Magic Circle as one of the event’s main headliners, and guitarist/vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf will also perform a set from her solo/ambient project at the fest as well.
VASTUM Live:
2/21-22/2020 Shadow Frost Music & Arts Festival – Frederick, MD [info]
After four years of near silence, Oakland death metal outfit VASTUM returns with Orificial Purge, the anxiously awaited follow-up to their acclaimed Hole Below. With its members playing in Acephalix, Necrot, Ulthar, Mortuous, Ionophore, Cardinal Wyrm, and others, the band’s dedication to their craft is showcased throughout the underground. After three standout albums over the course of the last eight years, the effect of VASTUM‘s influence has by now seeped into the wider death metal scene, leaving an indelible mark due to their singular amalgam of aural primitivism and aesthetic originality. Their most markedly refined and tortured oblation to date, Orificial Purge represents the dominant return of VASTUM, a death-doom band driven by the horrors of psychic and corporeal life.
VASTUM‘s Orificial Purge offers a distinctive blend of sinister atmosphere, punishing brutality, and an unparalleled lyrical and visual imagery that traces connections between perversion, mortification, and “an abyssal mysticism of sin.” Elements from previous albums are preserved on Orificial Purge, but they are evolved and devolved at once. The usual mid-paced dirge and cave-dwelling riffs are intertwined with slicing melodic dissonance and a celestial frenzy in the solos and the leads, all of which is set against the background of a bulldozing rhythm section. The dual vocal and lyrical exorcisms of Daniel Butler and Leila Abdul-Rauf combine to deliver unsettling, dichotomous meditations on “abjection as life, life as tragedy, and tragedy as an eviscerating, eroticized rapture through which an evil and useless humanity comes into being.
Source: Earsplit PR
LONG LIVE VASTUM.
STONE.
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