The heavy culture enthusiasts spotlight the Bay Area brutalizers’ triumphant third full length.
The Gimme Metal Vinyl Club has issued their most recent addition to their achieve of essential releases. Intent on showcasing a curation of extreme music’s best examples of artistry and progression, the latest installment focuses on the modern era of American death metal with the limited reissue of Vastum’s third LP, Hole Below.
The Gimme Metal team offered some insight into the most recent selection. “When we started Gimme Metal in San Francisco back in 2017, Vastum was one of the first bands we played. They were the leaders in the Bay Area death metal world and we always made sure to give them as well as other extreme metal bands, like Succumb, Necrot, from the area a lot of attention. When we had the opportunity to repress an exclusive variant of Vastums brutal third LP, Hole Below, we of course jumped at the chance.”
Gimme Metal detailed some of the criteria that made the album a great fit for the collection, “Originally released in November of 2015, Hole Below displays greater compositional dynamics, a wide range of impressive tempo changes and superior guitar and vocal solos. However, the band has been careful to preserve their native style and sound, as well as production, artwork and lyrics.”
Gimme Metal affiliate Todd Jones of NAILS shared his admiration for the Bay Area standouts and likened the band to legends of the genre, “Hole Below is an album that sounds like a focused intent to pummel by way of spiraling riffs that rarely go beyond the fourth fret. Not progressive but primitive, haunting psychedelic twisting riffs. The percussive nature is authoritative, emphasizing the angry and violent aspect of the music. Specifically when a riff goes into doom territory, the drums will choose a beat that brings out an angry motion, turning into a violent hard movement instead of a feel-bad slow doom motion. Melody here is not wallowing sadness, only menacingly eerie, similar to the figure on the album cover. Mid-Tempo to slow, memorable primitive riff, driving death metal. It doesn’t specifically sound like Bolt Thrower or Celtic Frost but I could imagine those bands fucking and producing an offspring called Hole Below.”
The reissue release date is set for August 16th. The final day to sign up for orders is July 31st. See the promo video for the limited release from Gimme Metal Vinyl Club below.
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