Band:	Vastum
Album:	Orificial Purge
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	October 2019

01. Dispossessed In Rapture (First Wound)
02. On The Knife (Second Wound)
03. Abscess Inside Us
04. Orificial Purge
05. Reveries In Autophagia
06. His Sapphic Longing

Ain't it weird to fall in love with a band through one of their albums, but their follow-up just does nothing for you?

That's the case with me and Vastum. I listened to Hole Below back in 2015 and I was absolutely floored, and to this day it remains one of my favorite death metal albums of the decade. In the meantime I did admittedly listen to a lot more death metal so maybe I got a bit saturated or lost appreciation for the things that I appreciated back then, but I just relistened to Hole Below and it still smashed my brains out, so maybe the issue isn't with me. Maybe Orificial Purge really is that underwhelming.

It's still a pretty good album and maybe I'm just holding it to too much of a high standard because of how much I loved Hole Below, but you don't just release an album like that and drop the ball. If this was a debut released by any other band, I'd listen to it, think it's cool, and move on with my life without thinking about it too much. But here we are, let's appreciate Orificial Purge for what it is, a mid-paced set of dissonant songs about perversion and autophagia. There's plenty of Bolt Thrower-esque riffs, Incantation-esque cavernous atmosphere, some Cannibal Corpse-esque fascination with the morbid and grotesque, and a Carcass-esque dual vocal attack and yada yada, it's all there.

There are plenty of moments where I'm pleasantly surprised and the heavy riffs make me do that "ugh" face, but once the first two songs are over, I'm finding that too many of the sections don't really pack enough of a punch as they could, sticking too much in that mid-paced territory and not being heavy and filthy enough to be engaging doom and not being fast and crushing enough to be engaging death metal, so they're stuck in that weird place where all the ingredients are there but the soup still tastes a bit too bland. I wish I could say that it clearly feeling like a 20 Bucks Spin release would be a good thing, considering how much I liked most of their past releases.

I mean, it's alright. It leans way more to good than bad and I can't tell Vastum to their face that they're doing something wrong. It was really frustrating to write this review while listening to the album, because often I'd stumble upon a section that sounds absolutely amazing and think that I'm doing the album a disservice being so harsh and maybe I should give it another chance, but then that section is over and it still feels like there's something missing. If they managed to release an album full of only "oomph" moments with no "eh" moments, they can do it again. But it's not Orificial Purge.