Vetter     

Vetterkult
Demonhood Productions 2012

Norway's Vetter takes black metal and sees it from a slightly angle than most of their peers.  And because of this, their songwriting is slightly askew.  They manage to take traditional black metal and twist it to their own demented ends.  A subtle and eerie intro breaks open into bombastic, horror inducing horns.  Then evil riffs and sharp noises crest through the early stages of Et Folk Av Karrig Jord.  The songwriting serves to unsettle the listener and leave them frightened and mentally disheveled as violent blasts and lumbering riffs create an undulating flow to the track.  The song finally crests with sawing speed and collapses onto ambient noise.  Huge walls of warbling distortion and ropey bass frolic like a troll in the freezing Nordic landscape on Brennoffer.  Mystical and organic synth create a beautiful and spiritual world on Slatten.  As a stark contrast, Brattefoss is a whirlwind of hypnotic destruction.  The riffs have such a buzzing sound to them they almost become mechanical.  The riffs are cold and lifeless, in a good way.  It is stark and barren rock in the middle of winter for the song's first segment.  Then the track downshifts into a bounding echoing riff that is suffocating in its emotionless repetition.   For the song's final 2 minutes a traditional doom passage emerges.  Gamal  Reinlender takes in a completely different direction with a solitary mouthharp, twanging in isolation.  Drawing us even further afield is the epic folk of Peters Vise which could have been brought straight out of a Norwegian fairy tale.  Guitars and synth are injected into the track for a slightly more metallic texture to the song.  Bordering on drone is the hulking, mezmerizing riffs of the title track.  Walls of shimmering distortion crush the listener while the song still retains a black metal core.  And that is microcosm for Vetter as a whole, even though the music branches off in varying directions there is a black metal heart beating at the album's core.  Vetterkult is an album that takes Norwegian black metal and turns it on its ear, yet still remains, at its innermost depths, a bastion of blasphemous and hateful art.