Vorum – Current Mouth Review

Vorum‘s brand-new EP spends exactly zero time fucking around. Not a single wasted riff, beat, break, yell, or solo; zero-point-goddamned-zero seconds of fucking around. From the first moment of “Angels Death” to the last squalling gasp of “Hungry Wounds,” Current Mouth is eighteen minutes of essentially perfect death metal, and, friend, if you need much more convincing than that, then you and I are strangers sailing very different ships.

That this howling, rude, impatient, perpetually-on-the-verge-of-total-collapse EP is such a magnificent triumph is, in all honesty, a bit of a surprise given the dullness of this Finnish band’s debut full-length, 2013’s Poisoned Void. Compared to that album, the production of Current Mouth is almost hellaciously raw. However, in the case of these five shit-kicking songs, the production is a huge benefit. The drumming, in particular, pounds like a hell-catapult, with the most satisfying, straight from the rehearsal space clatter. (However, if you’re some kind of terrible square who thinks this kind of unholy racket is completely without finesse, then kindly get a whiff of the almost funky ride-cymbal work drummer Mikko Josefsson turns in on “Hungry Wounds.”)

Throughout Current Mouth, everything is so loud, so fast, and so frantic that it can feel like pure chaos, when in fact, these songs are meticulously composed, so much so that once your ears adjust, you can hear the staff paper unrolling as it plays – two bars of this riff here, double it with a second guitar for another two, a quick 3/4 measure against the bedrock 4/4, and so on. The guitars in question, by the way, are in such constant, throttling motion that it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that there are probably more riffs packed in these eighteen minutes than in several of your favorite, riffiest thrash full-lengths.

This is death metal played for the sheer joy of it, and thus while Vorum almost certainly take themselves Very Seriously, you can still hear the smiles shining through. The half-time stomp break in the middle of “In Grime In Lust” is only one example of the unabashed fun to be found, and while Current Mouth occasionally sounds like the unhinged spiritual twin to Deathspell Omega‘s Drought, at other times it spits out a gruesomely beautiful set of leads that sounds like someone took Dissection‘s The Somberlain and dredged it through 10,000 sewers.

This is music for punching a garbage barge; bear-hugging the Hoover Dam; eating a half-ton of jellybeans and pole-vaulting to Mercury; living the well-examined life. Strap it on, friends, for we know neither the day nor the hour.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

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

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