Nine long years on from their first work “Posthuman”, avant-garde black-metal act Void return with a new record and a revamped line-up. What initially started out as a Norwegian-British collaboration featuring members of Code, Dødheimsgard and Ved Buens Ende, has now morphed into a fully fledged group based exclusively on British soil.One aspect that is immediately noticeable with “Void” is that is less adventurous than its predecessor, the band stripped away most of the electronic elements that were prevalent in “Posthuman” to go back to a more basic and raw approach, but still with a strong sense of experimentation.
So while you shouldn’t expect anything too out there, Void’s are still crafting some challenging and demanding black-metal, falling somewhere in between Voivod and Thorns.
That’s perhaps the best way to describe this album in the sense that it delivers some pretty weird time signatures, merging fierce, cold riffs with off-kilter, dissonant and Voivod-ian guitar chords. Songs like the weirdly titled “Alligator X-Ray”, “Ego Tranquilizer” and “Feral” certainly reminds me of a concoction between the two acts.
Bottom line, while “Vile” is not as bizarre and eccentric as “Posthuman”, it’s a more refined, raw and in-your-face proposition that will surely satiate your needs for a more technical and complex black-metal style. (7.4/10)
David Alexandre
Band info: www.myspace.com/posthumansynthetics
Label info: www.duplicate-records.com
For fans of: Dødheimsgard, Ved Buens Ende, Thorns
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