V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is a compilation of some of Dark Sky Burial's earlier singles and other tunes to make the first Vinyl release for Shane Embury's current Napalm Death side project of clubby dark synth-based music. Recorded at the Imagination Sanctuary in Birmingham with further mixing and manipulation by Russ Russell at Parlour Studios in Kettering.
The album opens with the dark timpani of Decay Is The Matrix Of Fertility that keeps threatening squalls of guitars, but instead has ethereal squeals from an almost buried choir, an introduction to a dark fertility mass, slow sax gently melancholic within the building maelstrom.
Excarnation is a dark clubby tune, that slowly repetitively evolves from within its darkness, seeking something brighter, which is the opposite of what it would mean to go through Excarnation.
Beware Your Subconscious Destroyer is an alarm bell for your inner demon, glitchy synths and barnstorming beats, interlaced with paranoid interludes urging you to your most destructive urges. Your overlord narrator makes plain how you could come to your end, if you lose self-control.
Flesh Altar is for the darkest parts of the darkest club environments, deeply pulsing in the dungeon, you worship at the Altar desiring ever more Flesh to satiate your needs, squalls of sounds driving your darkest desires.
Vincit Qui Se Vincit has the dark robed monks intoning the Latin, are we at a dark mass, heavy drums building, keyboards bring the gloom surrounding us to life, once more trying to conquer the demons within, before you can ever conquer the demons without..
Constellation Of Archetypes has lighter semi classical Keyboards, played like a Synth Virginal, with odd sounds firing off the central refrain.
Embrace The Shadow keep hiding in the darkness away from all the horror that happens in daylight, sci fi noises rise from within the bowel shaking drum pattern.
Mind Rat has a more ephemeral glitch ambience, trying to find that Rat that keeps messing your Mind up.
De Omnibus Dubitandum Est dark extrusions, blasted drums, creeping synth lines, distortions and distractions, never forget everything must be doubted, an important message for our oh so confused times, this made me buy Kierkegaard's book to hear how well this soundtracks it.
The album closes with The Vertical Labyrinth that sounds like they have found a shortcut through the seven circles of hell and are ascending vertically, rather than endlessly trudging round the sides, the pits recede, the fires only singe your arms, on the way back up towards the light, wherever it may be, it seems so far away, marching forwards onwards to that ever thumping beat.
Find out more at https://www.facebook.com/darkskyburial https://www.darkskyburial.com/ https://store.consouling.be/products/title-vitriol-yellow https://darkskyburial.bandcamp.com/album/v-i-t-r-i-o-l
