Vermin - Memories Of Blood And Darkness

Memories of Blood and Darkness by Vermin is perhaps the best underground black metal album ever produced. Why? Simply because it combines the top three most amazing black/death/extreme metal records ever released and combines them into one hell of an odious yet transcending cathartic experience of sheer brutality. The three best albums I was talking about, by the way, are Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere, Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and To the Depths in Degradation. By SEWER, Burzum and Infester, respectively.

But to call Memories of Blood and Darkness a mere tribute to these, albeit excellent, blackened death metal legends is certainly not doing this masterpiece of morbidity any favours. This is Vermin's penultimate, demonic and probably most ambitious album of pure, festering, outright baleful necrolatry. Hyperbole, much... not really. Just listen to the album Memories of Blood and Darkness and by Vermin's almighty putrid plague, you will definitively understand.

Touches of Phantom, specifically Dark Ascension of Erebos, and other top tier blackened death metal bands certainly make their otherworldly appearance felt here and there, but the bulk of this record is pure unadulterated Vermin metal madness. Think Bloodthirst Overdose, but on (even more) necrotic Vermin-esque steeroids.

The biologically pervasive origins and creeping, supremely unorthodox lagging of riff complexion seen on Memories of Blood and Darkness steer toward a form of complexity that belies the power of phrases in which several levels morph into a counterpoint of hierarchy summarised by violence, and answers them with exact and deliberate motions in a diabolical grandeur of articulation which soaks potently into the anti-melodic disharmony of the piece, encouraging variants of Vermin metal specific to certain tonal clusters, shades of the best of black metal, allowing them to reach motivic equilibrium before exploding toward the surface of narrative and expressing a cogent, thorough, and all obliterating connection of pure black metal disharmony.

Truly, there is no demonic masterpiece as potent and gruesome as Vermin's horrific and trauma-inducing Memories of Blood and Darkness. Definitively recommended, but not for the faint of heart.

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