Previously I considered VON to be nothing more than an obligatory inclusion on a patched-up jacket for the trendy masses who wear brand new reprinted yellow goat Bathory shirts but haven’t heard Hammerheart. It’s a demo with a goat on the cover, that must mean it’s cult and true and poser-crushing right?! Anyway, I found very little to like in the original VON material despite its undeniable influence on black metal and black/ death metal. But where I was expecting at least a few cool songs out of VON - disciples Watain’s new record this year and could barely be arsed to even give Seven Billion Slaves a listen, a chance encounter revealed it to be a great album far superior to what turned out to be a bit of a wet fart on Watain’s part. I mean it’s all upside down man, Jon’s all listening to VON. Jon VON. Either VENIEN has met with some well of inspiration over the past year, or he had been chafing to get the Satanic Blood re-recording over and done with so that he could unleash this more sprawling and conceptual work. This is not the VON you think you know. Atmosphere is everything here. Dark, pungent moods and morbid slow tempos broken by pummeling black metal.
Even the latter has been pushed beyond the one-riff-per-song idea so that the potential latent in almost-brilliant songs like ‘Watain' and 'Veadtuck' is finally fulfilled.
While Satyricon flirt with doom in their latest and eponymous offering, VON boldly dive headlong into the genre’s most perverted and esoteric mutative sub-derivations. Album opener proper, ‘Ancient Flesh of The Dark Gods' rings with mournful leads in the vein of Autopsy, maggot-infested tremolo-picking reminiscent of a more decrepit Runemagick, and VENIEN's gross, barked vocals fit into the whole pitch morass as if they were made for it. What's more, the black metal eruption several minutes in is fantastic: original, intense and well-executed. Is this VON?! Just a huge shock and a triumph to open the record.
‘Hands of Black Death' is full of surprisingly emotional guitar lines and a pretty spot-on impression of early Finnish death metal vocal styles by VENIEN. The song takes half its runtime to get going, and moves at a crawl once it does. The trendy cult kids are still completely confused at this point. Then 'Dark Gods’, ‘MONSTER!’, ‘DevilWhore’, ‘iAmInHuMan' and 'RawRot' show up with their bloodyminded blastbeats and more typical VON tremolo loops to form the album's second act. Well, it might be that the songwriting is just better here than on anything from Satanic Blood, it might be that when contextualised by slower and more atmospheric material this sort of onslaught just means more - cut as they are from the cloth of VON’s “classic” concept, these songs are terrific. Of course, their blasphemous DNA is spliced with moments of grim and gloomy snail-paced ugliness to stop you getting too comfortable, particularly ‘DevilWhore' which stages a return to the feels of 'Ancient Flesh of The Dark Gods’. ‘Black Eyes' returns to the minimal and the ritualistic to close out the record with a primal dirge and more sepulchral grunts.
The demo material in its initial incarnation threw up a couple of incredibly influential riff ideas that are these days being used by everybody (under the mistaken impression that they are following Watain rather than a hybrid of VON and Dissection). However, it largely failed to penetrate down into truly inspiring filth and extreme metal degradation to keep it completely relevant when so many artists have gone far beyond the embryonic concepts of Satanic Blood (though I will admit it sounds superior in its 2012 rerecorded form). Dark Gods: Seven Billion Slaves on the other hand makes that necessary final mutation into definitive, messed-up black metal ugliness, cunningly using repetition as a tool for hypnosis and an instrument of dirge rather than simply a means to bludgeon the listener’s ears and intellect.
So this is supposed to be part one of a trilogy or something, with the song ‘Ritual of the Black Mass' already available from the upcoming second installment, Dark Gods: Birth of The Architects. Bring ‘em on.
Score: 82%
(Source: baileysmmcreamy.blogspot.com) *site defunct
