Band:	Veilburner
Album:	The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom
Style:	Experimental black metal, Blackened death metal
Release date:	November 15, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Tem Ohp Ab In Mysticum
02. III Visions Of Hex-Shaped Hiss, Behead The Howling Spirit
03. The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom Part I
04. The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom Part II
05. Shadows Of A Shadow
06. Woe Ye’ Who Build These Crosses...Are Those Who Will Serve Us Death
07. V.I.I. (Voured Ichneumous Icon)

Don't invite me to the function if this isn't the vibe.

Look, I'll give you a huge confession. I judge books by their cover arts. It's not that I think that good cover art means good contents and vice versa, but I take the quality of the cover art into account in how much I enjoy the entire thing as a "package" even if I don't actually buy a physical copy of it. I'd probably feel a lot warmer about albums like Born Again or Dance Of Death or Garden Of Burning Apparitions if it wasn't for their mind-bogglingly awful cover arts. Thankfully Veilburner never had awful cover arts, but they always felt very underwhelming, which sadly was an impression that lingered even when taking the music into account, great as it was. Even if some of them had some pretty bomb album titles, like "A Sire To The Ghouls Of Lunacy" or "Lurkers In The Capsule Of Skull".

So imagine my shock when my eyes meet this thing. And you take that cover art and stick on it an album title like "The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom". You have to choose between decapitation and wisdom?? All of it is just the right blend of goofy and awe-inspiring. And they take a page from the Monolithe book and make every song exactly 7 minutes long for the number's esoteric significance. Excuse me, but that's a package! At this point I don't even need to be that amazed by the music itself because there's no way the exhilarating impression left by the package can be broken by anything more than a complete letdown. And even though I admit I am quite impressionable, I was still familiar enough with Veilburner to know that a letdown was pretty much impossible. Rightfully so, the music on The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom is just as bonkers as its presentation.

What has always been Veilburner's greatest strength is writing very quirky and uncompromising experimental extreme metal that somehow still felt very accessible. For all its twists and quirks, The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom is not a suffocating or endurance-testing listen. You're more prone to have to fight keeping a straight face during some of the goofiest of vocal moments than to be bored by it. The very dramatic theatrical vocals, quite reminiscent of ICS Vortex, Vicotnik, or Bjørnar Nilsen, keep things feeling very oddball, though never in a way that doesn't feel entirely respectable for what the album is trying to do. And I think that it's the album's relative accessibility, and the fact that it still remains grounded, is what saves it from feeling too much for its own good.

As Veilburner is a duo, the classic structure of a vocalist and an everything-elser, there's clearly a lot of care put into making the sound feel organic. The drums are understandably the one instrument that sounds the stiffest, though they manage even so to find some interesting percussive progressions aside from their role as a backbone. The one-person nature of the instrumental line-up does make it much easier for the instrumental side of the record to feel purposefully unitary, with the synths and guitar lines especially working very well in tandem to create melodies that sound either very direct or very exhilaratingly psychedelic.

The album's very fixed structure doesn't affect the flow in a noticeable way, and there's no moment where it felt like the band is specifically forcing any song to be this exact length. Maybe the band is really that good at writing seven minute songs. The more direct songwriting makes The Duality Of Decapitation And Wisdom full of melodic hooks, its production makes it feel intoxicating, and its vocal performance drives the oddball factor to 11.

Now if only it had exactly seven words in its title.