Labels: Mordgrimm – Signal Rex
Review by: Alex Deller
Drawing from doom and black metal without being wholly either, Vaee Solis manage the admirable feat of being harsh and heavy without propping themselves up with the staid genre tropes we’ve heard so many times before. There’s a ragged spaciousness to their sound that occasionally tricks you into forgetting how crushing it all is; the fragmented, Khanate-esque guitar parts more often like glass shards slowly pushed beneath your fingernails than a crowbar to the back of the head. As the music writhes and uncoils vocalist Sofia Magalhães seals the deal with some truly petrifying vocals, her bleak, parched utterances part-way between a clotted gargle and a burning-on-the-pyre shriek. The results are both enveloping and enervating, possessed of a heaviness that goes beyond the sonic and weighs heavy on your mind long after the final note has faded.