By Monk
I have very few vices in life. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs. Okay, I drink a bit more than I really should… And I’m addicted to my beautiful wife… and great rock music. And it is this latter addiction in which I have found my newest fix, thanks to this latest, highly addictive, album from aptly names Swedish black ‘n’ rollers The Vice, which immediately grabbed a needle and injected itself into my veins with venomous intent – and effect.
I first came across this quartet back in the summer of 2020, when they impressed with their brand of sludge-encrusted sleaze-infused back-alley rock enough to muscle their way onto one of our Singles Club playlists. Now, some three-and-a-half years later, they are back on the attack with another slice of gloriously morbid, morbidly glorious sleech ‘n’ roll that just permeates every fibre and pore of your being from the first note to last, hypnotizing you with its combination of laconic languidity and gothic dankness.
Living up to its title, ‘Dead Canary Run’ is an album mined from the deepest recesses of the human soul, the smell of decaying flesh permeating from its dense, forbidding grooves, the sense of impending doom lingering heavily in the atmosphere which envelopes you in its fearful and inevitable embrace, holding you in its grip so tight that you struggle for breath but pray not to be released. Opener ‘Another Future’, for example, is a suitably dank, dark and depressive slice of unromantic gothic romanticism, like The Mission jamming with Behemoth, while ‘Tomorrow Will Mend’ kicks in with a surprisingly Hanoi Rocks-evoking sleaziness before the snarling vocals take us back into the darkest recesses of both their and our tortured souls.
Mixing dark gothic lyricism and mysticism with atmospheric post-black metal miens into hypnotic, shamanistic entrancements, The Vice deliver an album that simply draws you into its innermost recesses and keeps you there. On the surface, it is deceptively beautiful, but possesses a beastly, beatific, brutal underscore that is all the more effective for its almost compassionate restraint, only exploding into life when the need arises, otherwise sucking you deep into the overall immersive experience.
- ‘Dead Canary Run‘ is released tomorrow (Friday 19 January).
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