Vastum – Patricidal Lust (20 Buck Spin)
Friday, 15th November 2013
The first thing striking about Vastum’s Patricidal Lust is that of its artwork. Reveling in glorious, filthy, and obscene imagery, this one sits close to Eternium’s Repelling a Solar Giant in terms of some of the coolest cover art you’ll see this year. Plus, how many albums have a giant photo-bombing bat? Unfortunately, the artwork is truly the most interesting thing that Vastum has going for them.
The Vastum formula is drenched firmly in the doom/death tag and doesn’t seem to come up with many new ideas. The two most common influences would be that of Incantation and Coffins, with some added old-school Swedish crunch for good measure. Vastum mostly sticks to the mid-tempo, plodding along and tearing everything up in its path approach. The songs can be lengthy, but the disc does not linger with only 6 tracks in a span of 37 minutes. Despite the lack of gripping riffs, the vocal interplay between Leila Abdul-Rauf and Daniel Butler keeps things interesting as well as the more sexually explicit lyrical content that comes across far more intelligently and darkly than one would expect for this type of music.
While there’s nothing wrong with Vastum’s approach, it just feels a bit too familiar to be considered note-worthy. With stronger releases of this type already this year (Grave Miasma, Obliteration), one has to start to wonder how much more of this material the market can take before we’ve hit over saturation.
