VULNUS – Deceitful Entities

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  VULNUS
• Duration: 00:29:31
• Available from: 06/11/2024
• Label:

• New Standard Elite

With “Deceitful Entities,” Vulnus make a comeback that celebrates the brutal, technical death metal of the early 2000s: a sound that would once have found a natural home on Unique Leader Records, when the American label was still gloriously synonymous with brutality and precision under the guidance of the late Erik Lindmark. Now that the baton has been passed to labels like New Standard Elite, capable of keeping the spirit of certain extreme subgenres alive in more underground environments, the boys from Athens are inserting themselves with discreet mastery into a consolidated, but never too obvious, tradition.
This second full-length from the Greek group, here nine years after the debut album “Vessels of Throe”, is in some ways an authentic tribute to a musical aesthetic that has trained and galvanized a certain generation of death metal listeners: surgical and cutting riffs, massive grooves and compositional structures that balance complexity, aggression and, in general, extremely oppressive tones. Anyone who appreciated the work of bands like Inveracity or Beheaded at the time will immediately feel at home: songs like “Ego Disintegration” and “Futile Permanence” offer the right amount of technique, ferocity and a pinch of catchiness, supported by a production powerful and modern that highlights each instrument without being excessively smooth.
An element that emerges forcefully is the band's ability to successfully link together furious sonic assaults, in the form of edgy uptempos, and more cadenced and rounded sections, where the groove becomes the protagonist and certain vocal metrics also manage to evoke the rigor of the first Decapitated, with echoes of the charismatic figure of the old Sauron.
Although some guitar passages tend to repeat themselves a little too much along the tracklist, especially in terms of melodies, this does not greatly undermine the overall effectiveness of the album, which develops with such fluidity and intensity as to keep the listener's attention.
Ultimately, “Deceitful Entities” is perhaps not a record capable of subverting the most popular trends today, but it remains a sincere, well-executed and passionate work, which celebrates in its own way a golden era of technical and brutal. Above all, you can feel how spontaneous it is, as if his compositions were born from an authentic creative urgency, far from the more artificial logic of the current 'market'.
A listen therefore recommended to anyone who left their heart on those sounds now well over twenty years ago and wishes to rediscover their spirit in a more modern context. A band to follow carefully.