2009 Re-Visted: Vengeful- The Omnipresent Curse[2009]

Man. 2009 was a great year for me.
Bowerbirds released Upper Air.

Iron and Wine dropped the brilliant compilation album Around the Well.

Neko Case gave us the criminally under-rated Middle Cyclone.

Megafaun released the best album of the year in Gather, Form, Fly.

Bon Iver continued his evolution by handing us the Blood Bank EP.

Indie gods The Antlers released Hospice, of which my opinion is very well known(its the greatest thing ever.)

There is more( a lot more), but I listed off those fucking amazing albums to prove a point: in the year two-thousand and nine, I was flat out uninterested in Metal of any kind. I was fully absorbed in the glory and majesty of true American music: Folk and Country. I still love those styles of music with a burning passion. But early in 2010, I came back to my first, and true, love: Extreme Metal.

Sadly, 2009 was a lost year for me in terms of Extreme Metal. And it is only this year that I have begun to dig back in time and check out all those albums I miss. So for the next few days, my posts will focus on those brilliant 2009 releases I completely missed as I played my banjo and wrote folk songs with my dad(who was a folk musician who never took off.)

One of the first releases I checked out was Vengeful's The Omipresent Curse. A quick tl;dr version: Vengeful are a mix of Odious Mortem and Ulcerate. If that interests you, you can go ahead and stop reading. But as an internet blowhard, I feel obliged to give you a more complete write-up.

The first thing that stands out about this record is the sense of darkness: this is a heavy, heavy record, and is very, very dark. The band is capable of playing fast, but often focus on mid-paced and slower paced technical flourishes ala Ulcerate. But the albums guitar tone, general production and vocal attack sound a lot like Odious Mortem's Cryptic Implosion. Those are two pretty badass bands to be compared to, and for the most part the band lives up to it. This is a solid record, and one I am glad I was able to re-visit.

320 kbps

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