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VORLUST
Lick The Flesh

Transylvanian Recordings (2022)
Rating: 8.5/10

The album cover art to this debut full-length is sure to get your attention and I believe the sound of the band will too. Vorlust is a rather maniacal bunch from Oakland, California and I recall them from being involved with the wonderfully entitled Pisskrystals split EP with Astral Butcher last year, but I’d never really tucked into their feast of hammering, bestial blackened death metal.

The delightfully named Cunnus is the brutish female behind those scowling blasts of vocal debauchery, and the music matches her unhinged approach. This is fast, fiery, debilitating metal with chunkier, blood-soaked lower passages, but in either guise it’s all steeped in a dark, evil, aggressive atmosphere that nods to old school values that simply ravages in its aggression and blasphemous clanking.

Apparently, the cult followers call this “Oakland Beast Metal”, and I’d agree as this is for the most part galloping, ghoulish metal dragged along by those terrifying, chesty vocal burps of Cunnus who is armed with a devastating bass attack too which is complemented by the primal urges of sticksman Avinash Mittur. But for a clear indication of how this band really sounds then slap on the song ‘Venomous Scent’, because even with its threaded melody this is one hellish, bulbous monster of a track that chugs due to the riffage of Dustin Ponko (Dipygus) and Sonny Reinhardt (Necrot), so you get that really organic, well-soiled level of cess-pit drudgery. Indeed, this track really drags you into the most primeval of holes where even rats won’t scurry into.

There’s only seven tracks on offer here, but this is not a clan to be trusted. In fact, after just a few listens I feel like the cannibal “family” from the movie The Hills Have Eyes have just taken me out for a picnic.

‘Tormenta’ is a horrible lump of chugging evil that picks up speed and becomes a foaming, blood-red tide of deep, gouging rhythms. It’s murky bestial thrash fired by dehydrated vocal gasps whereby Cunnus reaches into herself with her own flailing tentacles and pulls her innards out before gulping them down.

The strangest thing about this hellish composition, as with all the tracks, is the wealth of melody, and yet I’m often conjuring up images of dank caverns, deep, dark red in colour with dripping walls of humidity scraped away by a piercing, cavernous solo.

‘Creatura’ chugs like a gnashing dragon crawling from the flames to pluck a victim for its emblazoned nest. The riffs are scorching hot, blazing like a furnace of ferocity before the final strains of ‘I Am Woman, I Am Beast’ prowls in its own harrowing cries of dismal euphony. This is bleak, suffocating and commanding as those old Venom, Bulldozer and Possessed records, yet brimming with extra hot sauce and spiteful intent.

The next time you get your friends round for a night on the Ouija board, be very careful you don’t accidentally conjure up the malevolent spirit of Cunnus, because there is no return from the suffocating black fumes of Vorlust. All this album needed was a token backwards message or two within its fold and I’d have been frazzled.

Neil Arnold

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