Labels: Dry Cough – Halo Of Flies
Review by: Alex Deller
Despite the sheer surfeit of doom records out there, there aren’t many these days that really take you on a journey. Most seem long merely for the sake of being long, dragging things out over the course of a gatefold double LP simply because that’s what’s expected of them. Canuck two-piece Vile Creature are a rare exception, and it’s fitting that the bleak wax and wane of their latest full-length was conceived as a way of telling a grim-sounding sci-fi tale rather than just a means of grinding your head in. Things are, from the off, dense, awkward and unpredictable. A glowering, smoky atmosphere accompanies soft spoken-word vocals before the upheaval begins, and the heaviness itself favours odd, unforeseeable collisions rather than tuckered-out Iommian tropes. At some points the noise is warm and cocoon-like and at others crushing to the point of disintegration; and while the beleaguered screams are unintelligible you can nevertheless glean from them a deep sense of pain, loss and foreboding. At various points I’m minded of Eagle Twin, MITB and Burning Witch, but more in terms of individuality and outlier status than sonic alikeness. Perhaps the closest comparison would be a blackened and less art-mangled iteration of The Body … not a comparison I make lightly, but in this case one that is waranted in terms of depth, clarity of vision and sheer bloody-minded aloneness.