Feel the Hate of Vaee Solis’ Adversarial Light

This band from Portugal, Vaee Solis, takes some of the most hateful vocals to touch a microphone and throws them against depraved riffs to make for music that brings an uneasy feeling when you are listening to it alone.  The production on their album Adversarial Light is impeccable, and milks the most anguish out of their performance as possible. The initial slap of this band is powerful, but can they keep you in this mental state for the duration of the album, or do we just go back to color-by-numbers metal?  Vaee Solis make equal parts sludge and doom. The have the disdain for melody that a band like Eyehategod possesses, but less of the punk attitude and a heavier emotional outpouring. They use some of  tricks from the ultimate book of  doom metal, but molest them with their malicious intentions.

The title track has the dirty bass tone that is more typical of sludge, but they keep the zombie-like pace. Once the drums really kick into the punishment at hand, the bass becomes less conspicuous, falling back in the mix. The shredded vocal chord torture that attacks these songs uses similar patterns. It’s up to the guitar to set the tone of these songs. The heavy is pretty much what you are getting here – they have trimmed the fat and use very little to season this razor blade casserole. They like to sharpen the edges with feedback. This is doom for fans of crust; it has a very dirty undercoating, despite the crisp production. The singer’s voice touches on almost a black metal like rasp at times, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call these kids “blackened.”

Label: Signal Rex / Degradagem

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“Feral Isolation” feels more feral than isolated to me. The vocals take on a higher, more crazed gurgle. I doubt they are screaming any real lyrics. The lower death metal vocals that do a call and response with them further my sludge suspicions. The hits begin to linger a little too long, and my mind starts to wander away from this album.  The feedback begins to become one of the album’s more interesting elements, until they let the chords collide in a more sonic manner. At a slower mid-pace, the songs have more direction, and this is coming from a guy who likes funereal doom. This does force the vocals to change it up ever so slightly, and a change of pace is really what this album needed. The vocals have some nervous break down like temper tantrums, not unlike a depressive black metal album.

I think once this band begins to explore the more sonic side that is being repressed slightly by the catharsis here, they will start writing some damn good songs. They show hints of this on “Cosmocrat” – the chords ring out with that sweetly dissonant darkness I love, the only problem is it is not allowed to really live up to it’s full potential. There is only one song past the nine minute mark, so if you are getting tired of the twelve-minute-plus epics so many bands tend to write these days, then this concise cry of anguish will give you the brief beatings you are looking for.