Vuyvr - Incinerated Gods

Vuyvr

Incinerated Gods

by Tom Colyer at 20 August 2014, 8:40 PM

I've always known that Black metal is to be taken a little like a cheap hooker; rough, uncaring and generally with as little money involved as humanly possible.  So it comes as no small shock to me whenever I come across a new album that fits all of these bills and is at first, wholly unimpressive.  It must be difficult to make a name for yourself these days, Black Metal is a genre that has had the lines so clearly defined and the boundaries have been set to limit what people can reasonably lumber under it’s dark and brooding title.

VUYVR are a Swiss 4 piece that stick to the guns of the tried and tested formula and try to improve on it a little with melodic elements and a slight dabbling in tempos.  “Incinerated Gods” is their second full-length release (I use the term full length very tenuously in this instance) and they are making quite a name for themselves in the Swiss Black Metal circuit.  They certainly tick all of the boxes and manage to avoid sounding atmospheric in the slightest.  Now, the atmospheric side of this kind of music is usually what piques my attention and keeps me wanting more but I can appreciate the rawness of the genre as well, hell I've always felt a strange kinship with the old Norse church-burners and the more outrageous fledgling days of Satan worship and all that debauchery.  We are far from those days now though and the scene has a much more politically correct image, after all, you can't glamourize people running around and cutting off each other’s head and burning down religious institutions.  Can you?

The album itself sounds like it could have been a very rough cut of “Revenge” by fellow Swiss metallers ALASTIS.  It's refreshing to hear an album that is recorded live for a change, it really allows the emotive side of the music to creep in and you don't have the feeling that they are all just listening to metronomes and doing maths equations in their heads.  The vocals have a good throaty demonic aspect to them and the guitars could quite well be playing alongside the final days of the apocalypse.  One thing that I really appreciated though is the switching of drummers halfway through the album.  It isn't something that changes the sound that drastically, but I think that it is just a wonderful way of ushering in a new member of the band and saying goodbye to an old one, it would be nice if more bands paid this kind of respect to their members.  Probably my favourite bit of the album is the tail end of the third song “Infected Water” where the music slows down and becomes almost doomy in its tempo and timbre.

If you are a Blackened soul then you may well need these guys in your life but if paying homage to Baphomet and Mephistopheles is a little too extreme for your tastes then maybe try something a little lighter, like NICKLEBACK.