They say he uses the whip, the manacles and the torment-frame they call Skeffington’s Daughter. It is a portable device, into which a man is folded, knees to chest, with a hoop of iron across his back; by means of a screw, the hoop is tightened until his ribs crack.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (p. 276)
Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall – set primarily in 16th-century England – centers around the life of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII while that monarch sought separation from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. In the process, of course, Henry installed himself as head of the Church of England and formally separated the Anglican Church from the papacy in Rome. One of the major threads running through the novel is the effort by religious authorities – frequently with the consent if not assistance of political authorities – to root out so-called heretics or schismatics, particularly those who sought out John Wycliffe’s translations of the Bible into English. The crackdown by the religious authorities produces some of the more striking passages in Mantel’s novel.
But, as I’m sure you’re wondering: What in the bloody Man Booker does that have to do with Vasaeleth, the American duo responsible for this utterly monstrous new release, All Uproarious Darkness?
Perhaps what is most interesting about Mantel’s narration of horrific torture and public executions is that it is done quite straightforwardly. Instead of reveling in gaudy, lurid detail, she simply tells us that “the hoop is tightened until [the man’s] ribs crack.” Elsewhere, describing a man burned at the stake, Mantel tells us that he was “[w]rapped in his sheet of flames” (p. 337). The prose is immediate and descriptive, but requires the reader to use her imagination to render all the supporting details. And that, of course, is where the real horror unfolds.
Vasaeleth’s All Uproarious Darkness proceeds in much the same way. These five songs are relatively brief and mostly fast, and they grind hard against any firm surface offered up against them. On a superficial level, then, it might not seem like much to get excited about. Pretty standard-issue death metal, just wrapped in that “sheet of flames,” right?
Well, no. Not quite. Just as with Mantel’s vividly realized portrait of life in sixteenth-century Europe, with all its intrigue and disease, its cruelty and caprice, All Uproarious Darkness reveals more of itself the more fully one allows oneself to inhabit it. Vocalist O.A. (also responsible for all instruments apart from the drums, which are mangled by Antinom) has a low, curdling rasp that drops itself into the instrumental chaos at odd angles, appearing without notice from around a corner, or all of a sudden whispering deathly gloats on your neck. His harrowing but often retiring performance is just one of the components that separates All Uproarious Darkness from its many – too many, really – peers.
Because, to be honest, Vasaeleth’s formula is hardly new: The band takes Incantation riffs (mostly circa Onward to Golgotha), runs ‘em through a bestial black metal winnowing machine, and then coats the whole thing in a morass of subterranean murk. It’s a pretty simple trick, but when it’s pulled off with the unswerving commitment and spot-on aesthetic of Vasaeleth, it’s damned effective.
The release’s brevity (not even twenty minutes) makes classifying it a bit of a toss-up, though Profound Lore boss Chris Bruni offered the following clarification: “[The b]and wanted to just treat it as the next Vasaeleth release/album…” So, call it an EP, LP, MCD, or whatever you want, but the fact is that this is the ideally digestible length for this type of punishment. It also means that each of the five songs will have to stand up to greater scrutiny, since the release isn’t quite long enough to sell itself on sustained atmosphere and reckless violence along.
Granted, this particular presentation of death metal will likely turn plenty of listeners away right at the door, and that’s fine. One hardly imagines that this Texas/Georgia duo spends much time fretting about whether they are reaching all and sundry lovers of murk. But here’s the funny thing: these dudes can riff, and that fact means that each song does stand as its own entity (if perhaps perverted and malformed). Buried under the scuzz are some really snappy death metal riffs, riffs that mutate and spool off into fuguing inventions before crashing back into themselves. And all the while, the drums – pitch-perfect in their ramshackle sound, as though the snare keeps lurching almost out of the drummer’s reach while the kick throbs in and out of the range of conscious earshot unpredictably – massage the riffs, egg them on, and pull back just slightly, every so often, to emphasize a particularly breakneck turn or lurch-time slowdown. The latter half of “Paradise Reconsecrated” is a great demonstration of this, stumbling back and forth between a city-leveling blast section and a caveman-hunting dinosaur stomp.
“Black Curse Upheld” is probably the album’s best song, but that does a disservice to how well these five songs flow together in something approaching a narrative arc. Nevertheless, the song starts on an especially woozy, disorienting riff, but quickly shifts into a neck-snapping groove before completely hauling ass down a stretch of Nonstop Blasts Highway, where there are no exits, and all of the roadkill is various parts of your body that have melted off when you weren’t paying attention. The song’s final riff, a sublime piece of ominous parsimony, slowly stretches out over a dust-belching doom trot, pulling a blanket of tar over the face of the sleeping world.
“It takes art to make sure the man does not suffocate: for if he does, everything he knows is lost” (Mantel, p. 276).
All Uproarious Darkness is five songs, nineteen minutes, total nuclear-powered bulldozer. But that takes art. Really, it does. Any longer, and there’d be no one left; any longer, and everything Vasaeleth has to say is lost; any longer, and the dead take their wisdom with them, to that place beyond salvage.
