[photos by Chris Johnston]
Orificial Purge, the fourth album from Oakland death metal quintet VASTUM, is now streaming through an exclusive Bandcamp Daily feature ahead of its official release this Friday through 20 Buck Spin.
VASTUM‘s lead vocalist Daniel Butler, guitarist/vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf, guitarist Shelby Lermo, bassist Luca Indrio, and drummer Chad Gailey are joined by Ryan Honaker who provides guest strings to Orificial Purge. Honaker and Abdul-Rauf also help shape the album with elements of ambience. Recorded with Greg Wilkinson (Necrot, Nightfell, Ulthar) at Earhammer Studios, and visually represented by the brooding abstraction of San Francisco artist Laina Terpstra, Orificial Purge is one of the year’s most vicious and hypnotic LPs.
Bandcamp Daily has interrogated Abdul-Rauf and Butler, and the interview now runs alongside the exclusive advance stream of Orificial Purge, offering of the album, “The music on ‘Purge is both sinister and suffocating, a dense and wholly appropriate foundation for its disturbing and intriguing lyrics.”
Stream VASTUM’s Orificial Purge ahead of its release at Bandcamp RIGHT HERE.
20 Buck Spin will issue Orificial Purge on CD, LP, cassette, and all digital platforms this Friday, October 25th. Find preorders at the label webshop HERE and at Bandcamp HERE.
Guitar World recently ran a feature on the 25 Best Metal Guitar Tones Of All Time where VASTUM‘s Leila Abdul-Rauf was featured alongside the likes of Black Sabbath, Slayer, Metallica, Entombed, Meshuggah, Danzig, Sunn O))), and more. See the piece HERE.
VASTUM will perform as one of the main headliners of the inaugural Shadow Frost Music & Arts Festival taking over Frederick, Maryland on February 21st and 22nd, 2020, joining Yakuza, Darsombra, labelmates Magic Circle, and many more. Guitarist/vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf will also perform a set from her solo/ambient project at the fest as well. With additional tour dates to be announced in the coming months.
VASTUM Live:
2/21-22/2020 Shadow Frost Music & Arts Festival – Frederick, MD [info]
After four years of near silence, VASTUM returns with Orificial Purge, the anxiously awaited follow-up to their acclaimed Hole Below. With its members playing in Acephalix, Necrot, Ulthar, Mortuous, Ionophore, Cardinal Wyrm, and others, the band’s dedication to their craft is showcased throughout the underground. After three standout albums over the course of the last eight years, the effect of VASTUM‘s influence has by now seeped into the wider death metal scene, leaving an indelible mark due to their singular amalgam of aural primitivism and aesthetic originality. Their most markedly refined and tortured oblation to date, Orificial Purge represents the dominant return of VASTUM, a death-doom band driven by the horrors of psychic and corporeal life.
VASTUM‘s Orificial Purge offers a distinctive blend of sinister atmosphere, punishing brutality, and an unparalleled lyrical and visual imagery that traces connections between perversion, mortification, and “an abyssal mysticism of sin.” Elements from previous albums are preserved on Orificial Purge, but they are evolved and devolved at once. The usual mid-paced dirge and cave-dwelling riffs are intertwined with slicing melodic dissonance and a celestial frenzy in the solos and the leads, all of which is set against the background of a bulldozing rhythm section. The dual vocal and lyrical exorcisms of Daniel Butler and Leila Abdul-Rauf combine to deliver unsettling, dichotomous meditations on “abjection as life, life as tragedy, and tragedy as an eviscerating, eroticized rapture through which an evil and useless humanity comes into being.
http://www.vastum.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vastum/440192535391
http://www.20buckspin.com
http://www.facebook.com/20buckspin
http://twitter.com/20buckspinlabel