Vassafor are a band from New Zealand that has had music reviewed before in this zine and on this recording plays an occult mixture of black and death metal and this is a review of their 2020 album "To The Death" which will be released in August by Iron Bonehead Productions.
A very dark and distorted sound starts off the album along with some drum beats a few seconds later which also takes the music into a heavier direction. Ritualistic chants can also be heard in the background briefly before evolving into grim sounding black metal screams and the riffs also add in a decent amount of evil sounding melodies.
When guitar solos and leads are utilized they are done in a very dark yet melodic style as well as having their chaotic moments. When the music speeds up a great amount of tremolo picking and blast beats can be heard which also gives the songs more of a raw feeling and most of the tracks are very long and epic in length and at times the music also gets very ritualistic sounding.
Throughout the recording you can also hear a decent mixture of slow, mid paced and fast parts along with the music also adding in some elements of war and death metal. Touches of 90's era doom/death metal can also be heard in the slower sections of the songs, as the album progresses a brief instrumental can also be heard and the vocals also start getting deeper and bestial sounding on the later tracks as well as the closing song also introducing clean playing onto the album The production sounds very dark and raw while the lyrics cover Satanism, Occultism, Death Worship, Cyclical Warfare and Galactic Entropy themes.
In my opinion this is another great sounding recording from Vassafor and if you are a fan of occult black and death metal, you should check out this album. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE "To The Death" "Eyrie" and "Singularity". 8 out of 10.
http://soundcloud.com/iron-bonehead-productions/vassafor-eyrie
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