Vermapyre/Ides Of Gemini – split LP (Magic Bullet Records)
The problem with split records is that, no matter how good the bands involved may be, one side tends to outdo the other. It’s rare enough to find a split between two good bands, and exceedingly so to find one where both sides end up getting the same amount of play.
Vermapyre/Ides Of Gemini – split LP (Magic Bullet Records)
The problem with split records is that, no matter how good the bands involved may be, one side tends to outdo the other. It’s rare enough to find a split between two good bands, and exceedingly so to find one where both sides end up getting the same amount of play. It’s a shame, too, because it’s a format with promise – likeminded artists get to join forces and a listener gets to hear a variety of music for the price of one album. But whether that music happens to be worth listening to is another matter altogether. I’d like to say that the recently-released split between Vermapyre and Ides of Gemini bucks this trend of the unbalanced split, but in all reality it side-steps the issue altogether by pairing two artists whose approaches are so widely disparate that any sort of qualitative comparison is ultimately pointless.
Vermapyre
If one were prone to understatement, it might be appropriate to suggest that the Vermapyre material sets a harsh tone for the record. The band, a solo project of Dwid Hellion of long-running hardcore band Integrity, generally leans more towards the noisiest strains of black metal than the sort of metallic hardcore for which he’s better known. The noise element is crucial to understanding Vermapyre’s approach – this isn’t black metal in the Emperor mold; more a twisted mass of sounds, a harsh metallic clangor that throbs and shrieks its way through one fifteen-minute composition, sounding largely like a bad acid trip vision of industrial decay and collapse. From under this avalanche of dissonance, drums appear briefly and harsh vocals will occasionally emerge, only to be re-subsumed as quickly as they made themselves heard. It’s difficult listening, to be sure, a journey into a nightmarish sonic terrain that defies as many genre expectations as it embraces.
Ides Of Gemini, on the other hand, approach darkness and heaviness from a far more measured, subtle perspective. This isn’t to say that there’s no heft to their downtuned guitar and plodding, martial drums. But the harmonized vocals of J. Bennett and Sera Timms (the latter of which also is member of the consistently excellent Black Math Horseman) provide a ghostly melodic sheen to the material that’s as eerie as it is distinctive. It’s hard to really come up with an adequate summation of the band’s sound – it’s heavy without seeming too metallic, and atmospheric without losing its melodic focus. The band’s side of the split features two songs, “Martyrium of the Hippolyt,” from their 2010 EP, and the heretofore unreleased “Constantinople”. The former is somewhat sparser, the latter a bit heavier, but the two songs possess an ethereal quality that evokes a sense of openness, calling to mind physical open space as readily as it does the ambiguous interstitial expanses between emotional poles.
Ides Of Gemini
While there doesn’t seem to be any explicit theme to this split, it is interesting to see what it represents; namely, a splintering of heavy music into paths that may at first seem sharply divergent, but are actually more complementary than first impressions might suggest. Neither artist offers a concrete statement of purpose, instead opting for an approach that seems more like a step or two along a journey. Both bands embrace some familiar sonic signifiers, but simultaneously subvert each one, twisting all the varied and contrasting elements into two distinct, discomfiting wholes. It’s this sense of direction, of pushing outwards, that unifies the two halves, making the album seem less like a split and more like two wanderers encountering each other while forging distinctive paths through an aesthetic wilderness.
