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VENUS
Obscured Until Observed

Xtreem Music (2023)
Rating: 8/10

Just one glance at the band logo and you know this is going to be some cosmically-aligned and cryptically designed progressive thrash outing. Venus consists of two members, Giorgis Verginis (guitar and harsh vocals) and Antonis Avtzis (guitar and clean vocals), who hail from Athens in Greece which at the moment is a real hive of activity with regards to quality heavy metal. But with Venus there is something otherworldly going on. With this debut full-length album it’s as if the listener has stepped into some vast network of Lovecraftian horror fused with Isaac Asimov, alongside bands Vektor and Voivod.

The lyrics throughout are as thorny and intricate as the music. “So have you ever noticed how anthropocentric is your god, 94 billion light years and you believe you’re the only one” is not the sort of lyric you’ll hear every day, but if you jump into the epic track ‘The Observatory’ then that’s the sort of brain mangling prose you will have to contend with. The lyrics never feel all that far removed from Voivod or tech thrashers Droid as Venus projects the listener through a complex, wiry maze of thrash shifts while also providing a cold, galactic atmosphere punctured by sharp angles and metallic glints.

This is a record one needs to lay under the stars for in order to appreciate its textures; the 11-minute closer ‘Subatomic Search For Human Consciousness’ and the apocalyptic scrapes of ‘City Of Nektron’ are lethal tangles of jarring which spouts that vary from the spiritual (“The glorious artificer mind rules, and collects our consciousness in an hourglass of thousand stairs, and transfers our soul through reincarnation”) to the membrane-stretching snaps (“The city of Nektron, a strange architecture, a brainwash injection designed to destroy, an incomplete network, your head in a cable sucking your fluids”).

The riffs dominate this album with sharpness and precision, but at times the dual vocals leave me rather perplexed. Firstly, the cleaner voice is rather bland and soulless, while the raspier expressions more abrasive, and when delivered in unison it doesn’t always work. However, for the Vektor freaks among you I have no issue in recommending the befuddling opener ‘Sons Of Grus’, the strategically fizzing ‘Circus Strange’ or the melodious miasma of instrumental ‘The Arrythmic Pulse Of Universe’.

Obscured Until Observed is not as meaty or as potent as Vektor, but it still scrambles the brain with one mere whisk.

Neil Arnold

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