The Wormlust Collective

When I spoke with H.V. Lyngdal, the only member of Wormlust, and he asked me to listen to his album, I was immediately interested for his music as you don’t find bands coming from a scene as small as that of Iceland’s very often. “The Wormlust Collective” that I have is a compilation album of their three demos which were released in 2009, in 2010 and in 2011. The band has also released another demo, a split and recently their first full length album. This album contains three tracks, of forty five minutes of duration, by which the first two offer dark Black Metal, while the last one is a dark ambient track.

Each track is quite long in duration, about fifteen minutes each, and it is a journey inside darkness, madness, depression, chaos. I will focus the review on the first two demos as the ambient one couldn’t create any sentiment and it just made me bored, but I don’t have the experience to judge it. Concerning the first two tracks, their riffs are quite interesting, have changes and variety. The speedy riffs are very dark, repetitive, chaotic and psychedelic, they achieve to hypnotize the listener and to drag him into their dark trip. Apart from the fast riffs, the listener will also come across to some mid tempo as also some slow parts and passages, other times melancholic, other times drowning and other times depressing, they make the journey more interesting. The atmospheric ambient passages which exist in the compositions are a few and they affect the atmosphere nicely.

The guitars are louder than the rest of the instruments and they have distorted but clean sound, they don’t have any mistakes and they put out much feeling. The bass isn’t clearly audible whereas the drums sound physical and they have quite interesting lines filling the compositions nicely. The vocals are lower in the mixture, they are drowning Black Metal vocals which compete the pieces of the journey inside madness. The production is clean and bassy and along with the very good mixture it offers a massive sound which fits to the style of the compositions and highlights them. The lyrics are not contained in the cd and because of the style of the vocals I didn’t manage to understand in what language they are written.

The first two demos created and offered to me emotions and they were interesting. I hope also in their recent full length album to have continued in the style of these demos and not in the style of the third one. So this compilation is a quite good release not only for the fans of Wormlust but also for those who want to get to know them. Because their style is different from the typical Black Metal I suggest you to listen to it before you buy it.