Bandcamp Verheerer have always kept their faces in shadow, a clandestine black-metal project out of Flensburg on the staunchly anti-fascist Vendetta roster, and Urgewalt wears its heart where the hood usually is: the record is dedicated to everyone who rose against oppression and fascism, and to those still fighting. That conviction runs through it. This is black metal that has grown melodic death muscle and a taste for theatre, German-language shouts trading with clean melodic arcs, tremolo runs giving way to strings, acoustic guitars and spoken-word passages that play like scenes from a radio drama.
The band are at their best when they let the drama breathe. “Grabenwurm” is the highlight, mastered with actual headroom instead of a brickwall, its sawing riffs and growl-to-clean-to-spoken-word arc carried on an organic, transparent mix that the rest of the album only reaches for. “Hail Mary” earns its length by collapsing a dense metallic wall into an operatic acoustic-and-strings coda, and the closer “Kriegstreiber” leans into the atmospheric, post-black end, its quiet acoustic and spoken outro landing all the harder for the storm before it. When Verheerer trust contrast over sheer volume, they are genuinely stirring.
The problem is the mastering. Too much of Urgewalt is pushed into a loud, compressed wall that flattens the transients and stacks the low mids into mush around 200 Hz, so the fast riffs lose definition and the cymbals turn shrill at the peaks. It is the sound of a raw, furious record squeezed for streaming loudness, and it robs the heavier tracks of the air the theatrical ones get right. The songs are strong; the ceiling on the master keeps them from hitting as hard as they clearly want to.
Urgewalt is a fierce, sincere, genre-blurring blackened record with real ideas and its politics worn proudly on the sleeve, and when Verheerer marry their pagan-theatrical instincts to a mix that breathes it is a powerful thing. Come for the conviction and the dynamic set-pieces, and turn it up despite the master rather than because of it. A band with more in them than this recording quite lets out.
Blackened, melodic extreme metal with pagan theatrics and post-black melancholy, German-sung, strongest when it trusts contrast over volume. “Grabenwurm” is the highlight, mastered with real headroom, its sawing riffs and growl-to-clean-to-spoken-word arc on an organic transparent mix. “Hail Mary” collapses a dense metallic wall into an operatic acoustic-and-strings coda, and the closer “Kriegstreiber” leans atmospheric and post-black with a quiet acoustic-and-spoken outro. The reservation is the mastering: much of the record is pushed into a loud, compressed wall that flattens transients and stacks the low mids into mush around 200 Hz, so fast riffs lose definition and cymbals turn shrill at the peaks. Strong songs squeezed for loudness; the theatrical tracks breathe where the heavy ones do not.
Standout tracks: Grabenwurm, Kriegstreiber, Hail Mary
