Vulvanic - ブラックエンジェルの色合い / 秘密の夜の殺人者 (Sentient Ruin)
Repackaging two demos from 2019 and 2020, ブラックエンジェルの色合い / 秘密の夜の殺人者 offers a white-knuckle hellride through Vulvanic’s psychedelic pigfuck pandemonium while completely ignoring the question of why a band from Peru speaks Japanese. Chalk it up to chronic substance abuse, because they descend from the hills like the LSD-slinging biker gang in Panos Cosmatos’ bizarro fantasy/horror mash-up Mandy, all hopped up on bootlegged wet and roaring at the sky over the zizz of angry chainsaws. These twelve tracks drip fluids from black metal, crust punk, hardcore, and (modern) war metal into a feculent Pollock-esque abstract, messily smearing these earth tones across a glaze of strobe-lit, neon glitz. While there’s no shortage of high-octane riffs to quicken the frenzied pace, the production wisely prioritizes the smudged textures and lecherous atmosphere over any sort of instrumental clarity. The vocal performance is the highlight of the record, and it’s as relentless and unintelligible as an orc berserker binge-drinking through an aneurysm, lathering blood and sweat into a guttural ooze that leaks out of the mid-range like ectoplasm from a skewered poltergeist. On the B-side, shrieks and howls stretch like taffy, then bounce and echo with the metallic boing of a finger-flicked doorstop. This polyglot gabble often melts and vanishes into the pinwheeling mix, buffeted by disorienting guitar smut and salvos of hard-panned drums. Set and setting are irrelevant, because this abomination will sour even the most ecstatic of altered states with its crass and addlepated verve. As a result, ブラックエンジェルの色合い / 秘密の夜の殺人者 will likely only appeal to the most masochistic fans of hallucinogenic BM, but if you enjoy a bad trip as much as you do a good one, Vulvanic have measured out a heroic dose you won’t want to pass up.