Tenebrae In Perpetuum – Vacuum Coeli Review

I recently watched the John Wick movies, and I mostly hated them. They start from a place of great honesty, which is by recognizing that it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch well-choreographed sequences of stylized movie violence. But instead of just leaning fully into that debauched ballet of “man with gun and knife and car and sometimes horse makes other people dead,” the movies insist on spinning out increasingly arcane yet maddeningly under-elaborated mythologies and portentous world-building. For goodness sake, friends, don’t you just sometimes want to watch a movie where everything blows up real good?

If you’ve lingered long in the ghoulish halls of black metal, you know as well as I do that there’s plenty of John Wick black metal out there. And, good reader, I am not here today to tell you that I don’t enjoy John Wick black metal. Instead, I am here to (thankfully) end this spurious metaphor just as soon as I finish telling you that Vacuum Coeli, the fifth album from Italy’s Tenebrae in Perpetuum, dispenses with any John Wick fussiness in favor of blowing it all up real good with grade-A, straight-ahead, ice-cold black metal.

Tenebrae in Perpetuum main-man Atratus handles all guitars, bass, vocals, and (minor) electronic touches here, with drums provided by (relative) newcomer Chimsicrin, now appearing on album number perpe-Two-um. Atratus’s guitars are an absolutely frigid jangle of hypnotic tremolo, and his anguished howls sound either like someone repeatedly stubbing his toe in the dark, or like someone midway through being eaten by a bear. From a brute force perspective, though, Chimsicrin is the star of the show, as he gives his drum kit such a ferocious beating that it’s almost indecent. His blasts are a precision slipstream and his tom-heavy fills sound, in all the best ways, like someone throwing a box of marbles down twelve flights of stairs.

For the most part, the songs on this economical album slip into a hypnotically blasting melancholy, but peppered throughout are many excellent moments where the band switches from furiously intense blasting to a slightly drawn-back groove, with the drums adding a crosswise patter while the guitar lines snake around each other. Much of “Un Angelo Nero” blares by in a relatively simple construction of single-note tremolo melodies, but if you let the hypnotism seep into you, it becomes very effective (and almost affecting). “Mors Triumphans” opens with such an elastic churn that it briefly sounds like if Ulcerate tried their hand at frosty second-wave black metal.

To be honest, I have been pretty bored and underwhelmed by most black metal lately. The vast majority of shoegazing black metal made for wearing cozy sweaters is a pretty big miss for me, and the absolute glut of solo raw black metal or dungeon synth that Bandcamp hemorrhages hourly is enough to make a penitent believer out of any church-disrespecting atheist. Vacuum Coeli is a welcome breath of fresh air in large part because it does not seem to harbor any great aspirations outside of itself. Here is an invitingly tactile world of snarling aggression and withering sadness, respectably raw but still thoughtfully composed, that you can enter and leave as the mood strikes. There’s no fussiness, no mythology, no bloated narrative; just forty-four minutes of artful, scything violence. It blows up real good.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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