Vulto Abissal - Until the Dark Solitude Take Our Soul

The greatness of Les Légions Noires is contrasted heavily by the failures of the legions of wannabes. Vulto Abissal is a band which borrows some LLN imagery and has some utterly ridiculous pictures of a fat guy with corpsepaint dripping from his eyes and mouth. It looks more like his mouth is overflowing and he's crying than he looks morbid. Pathetic and silly. It's nice of him to let us know exactly what he's trying to ape, at least.

"My mouth is so full that's
it's spilling out and I'm crying."

The sound, I suppose, has an aesthetic vaguely resembling Mutiilation's first album or a late-generation tape dub of a Vlad Tepes. Ultimately it's just a boxy distorted guitar tone from a shitty recording over a drum machine with vocals distorted from the recording. This moron clearly thinks he's emulating an aesthetic by sounding shitty by recording his two parts, guitar and vocals, poorly, but that's the incompetent, childish emulation of the black legions in which fools who pay no attention to how the music is actually composed try to emulate how a degraded tape dub sounds. It's a fucked up imitation of an aesthetic that isn't even done well, never mind the music being shitty.

Maybe the second track being cut in the middle of a line is an emulation of that time Darkthrone did it. Whoever the cranky shouting in the first track is an homage to, I'm sure they think it sounds goofy. The 20-minute synth closer is leagues more boring than the 25-minute synth track on Filosofem.

Limited edition face
one copy b/w splatter

The music is mostly two-chord riffs with two variations of each chord - essentially playing a power chord and moving one finger up, then shifting the hand and repeating. A steady strum, a galloped chug, or tremolo picking, paired with a kick-snare tick of a drum machine which is set to one speed for a song, losing the human element in both components there and seeming completely linear, immobile, and incompetent. This isn't emotionally moving, it's a shallow reflection of the reverie induced by that which is truly powerful music. The title of this should be:

Fail Satanas, We Aren't the Black Legions!