Vemod – The Deepening Review

It’s hard to accuse Vemod of being in a rush. It has been twelve years since the Norwegian duo of Jan Even Åsli (guitar/bass/songwriting) and Eskil Blix (drums/vocals) released their debut album, Venter På Stormene. Now expanded to a trio with Espen Kalstad on bass, Vemod’s new album, The Deepening, shows ample evidence of long, patient crafting. Like jagged wind piling sand into dunes, like water in its dutiful course carving away stone, The Deepening presents the implacable work of nature as the only spirituality worthy of worship.

Vemod’s black metal is atmospheric, hypnotic, and reverent, with lengthy songs that evolve slowly and feature a few key sections or themes that are mined for all the expressive depth they can muster. Compared to the distant, ghostly sound of the debut album, on The Deepening the production is significantly richer, live and naturalistic and warm. Blix’s drums have an appealing looseness, especially in the faster sections, and Kalstad’s bass is beautifully plump and rolling. Blix’s powerful harsh vocals are even more central in the mix this time around, and in an excellent new twist, Åsli provides stirring clean vocals at several points across the album.

After a brief scene-setting intro, the proper opener “Der Guder Dør” is ushered in by the thumping of carefully poised drums as if asking the listener to bring themselves into ritual communion with the iron sky and evergreen forest. Vemod’s songwriting is almost mathematical in its unfolding, with the guitars striking a jangly tone as they follow the robust outline sketched by the bass and drums. This means that The Deepening doesn’t set out to win you over with hall of fame-worthy earworm riffs, but rather to pull you into the sound so completely that you start to breathe as it breathes, to step where it points the way.

Vemod accomplishes this immersiveness without any extra bells and whistles – you won’t find any wild pyrotechnics, extra instruments (beyond a bit of subtle keys), or avant-garde flourishes. The most left-field the album gets is on “Inn I Lysende Natt,” where the shimmering pitter-patter of the drums and the extra bounce in Kalstad’s bass give the song a glorious, windswept post-punk twitch. The end of “True North Beckons” hits a rousing climax with the line “I stood in a great hall of starlight,” which strikes a resonance with Agalloch’s “In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion.” The artists most similar to Vemod tend to be those that take a similarly patient and relatively unadorned approach to songwriting (Nasheim, Grift, Stilla, Drudkh, early Alcest), but it’s easy to find connections to Empyrium, Ulver/Bergtatt, and even Caladan Brood, as with the spotlight on Åsli’s gorgeous multitracked vocals at the start of the title track.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, The Deepening arrives in the perfect season. With the earth blanketed in snow and ice, it’s tempting to think that everything is sleeping, that all life is held in temporary abeyance. But the glass air and pale sun of winter have a way of sharpening and clarifying the natural world. The Deepening feels like a guided practice of attentiveness to nature’s impassive grandeur. Yes, there’s stillness and quiet, but that just means you have to listen more closely.