Vessel of Light, Woodshed: Beyond the Cellar Door
With grisly tales to tell and equally grisly riffing to roll, Vessel of Light make their full-length debut through Argonauta Records with the chugging heft of Woodshed. The collaboration between Ancient VVisdom vocalist Nathan Opposition and guitarist Dan Lorenzo of Hades and formerly — perhaps more relevant in this case — the bluesier-rocking side-project The Cursed, first appeared with a 2017 self-titled EP (review here), and the 11 tracks and 41 LP-ready minutes of Woodshed very much build on the aesthetic principles that the short release laid out. Lorenzo brings a decidedly East Coast crunch to his guitar, reminding as he leads the way through the swing of second track “Part of My Plan” of Danzig‘s “Twist of Cain” while the later “Man’s Sin” finds a more aggressive push ahead of the doomly “Day of Rest,” and Opposition answers with vocals memorable in their melody and lyrics so creeper they should probably be reported.
It’s not so much ‘woodshed’ as it is ‘woodshed with a trap door underneath where you’ll find the bodies of all those missing women.’ I haven’t actually done a body count, but a hypothetical “she” meets a ghastly fate on more than one occasion in cuts like “Son of Man” and “Beyond the Cellar Door.” Indeed, following the rollout title-track introduction, Woodshed seems to follow a narrative course of love, maybe-betrayal and violence. Murder balladry is nothing new — dudes have been axing their significant others in art for as long as there’s been art — but Vessel of Light are resoundingly premeditated about it, and as the album finds resolution in the closing duo of “End it All” and the acoustic finale “Pray for a Cure,” the gothic edge brought to the proceedings through Opposition‘s vocals becomes only a part of the resentment-fueled plotline.
Malevolence abounds. Even in “Part of My Plan,” which is a classic I’m-on-drugs-rolling-out-having-a-good-time vibe, there’s an undercurrent of something darker, or maybe that’s just expectation after the EP. Either way, the lyrics tie together with references between songs to each other and by the time Vessel of Light are through “Part of My Plan” and “A Love So True” and into “Son of Man,” things have clearly taken a turn.
It doesn’t seem like a controversial position or a “hot take” to say one is against the taking of another human life. Again, Vessel of Light are hardly the first to make that aesthetic choice, but something about the darkness that surrounds Opposition‘s lyrics gives their violence a formidable presence throughout Woodshed. As “Son of Man” leads into the massive chugging lurch of “Watching the Fire,” the sense of going deeper into a twisted mindset is palpable, but while much of the material is slow in the tradition of the doom at its roots — Trouble, Type O Negative — monotony is held at bay through subtle shifts in volume and delivery.
“A Love So True” stretches out the guitar work and relies more on the drums to roll itself forward, while in following “Beyond the Cellar Door” — which is the longest track at 5:46 — “One Way Out” answers the layered vocals with not only another dual-melody there leading to vicious screaming, but layers of intertwined guitar as well, Lorenzo filling out the sonic space before Opposition recounts “Now it’s over/The deed is done/Homicide, suicide” in a harsh-throated rasp. Those aren’t the last screams, either. As the storyline moves through “Man’s Sin” and “Day of Rest” and the passion of the crime becomes so central to the thread uniting the songs, and that’s further realized in the album’s second half.
The turning point would seem to be “Beyond the Cellar Door,” which is a standout reminding of slowed-down Dirt-era Alice in Chains with a meatier chug and pervasively grim atmosphere offset by vocal harmonies ahead and after sampled screams and the guitar solo. “Beyond the Cellar Door” is resolved in chug ahead of the similarly-intentioned “One Way Out,” and that leads to the destructive apex of the album in “Man’s Sin,” “Day of Rest” and “End it All” ahead of the closer.
Momentum is a key factor there, and if you might accuse Vessel of Light of neglecting the details, it’s worth noting that the push through those three tracks — “Man’s Sin,” “Day of Rest” and “End it All” feels specifically geared to have the listener lose themselves in the dive. Even the song titles feel arranges so that one piece will carry into the next, and as “Beyond the Cellar Door” lumbers into that movement that consumes so much of side B, one might consider the arrangement of words “Man’s Sin” as opposed to the earlier “Son of Man” as indicative of the gear being shifted in Woodshed‘s second half. That is, it’s subtle, but something Lorenzo and Opposition do extremely well is build that momentum in songs that still never really get all that fast. It becomes a question of songwriting efficiency, and there’s plenty of that to go around from Vessel of Light, but neither do they lose the sense of mood that they’ve worked so hard to construct.
That is, they don’t just get to “Beyond the Cellar Door” and say, “okay here we go” and speed through the rest of the record. With the linearity of the story being told and the fact that the first-person speaker in the lyrics is descending into madness and dealing with the fallout of that, rather, it makes sense. Short sentences. Lots of stops. Build tension. Affect rhythm. Get it? Okay. The crawling finish in “End it All” accounts for itself in letting the audience know how the plot ends, but that leaves “Pray for a Cure” as a curious outlier in both sound and perspective. Its acoustic foundation is something of a turn given the rest of the full-bodied guitar tone surrounding — though that puts it right in Opposition‘s wheelhouse, given his work in Ancient VVisdom — but even more, are we in the moment where the protagonist is dying?
Because “End it All” sure comes across as pretty final, and “Pray for a Cure” is therefore an epilogue, and all the more so because it’s unplugged. I’m not at all against the track — expanding the sonic foundation isn’t going to hurt the band or the album at all — but that turn in perspective is somewhat jarring at the album’s end. That may well be intentional, as Vessel of Light offer little comfort throughout the record preceding either. What they do instead is set of a current of atmospheric dread; depression, anger and, yes, violence taking root in each track one way or another.
The disturbing parts are supposed to be disturbing, and Woodshed does nothing to desensitize the violence in a problematic way. The key takeaway from Vessel of Light‘s debut is that there’s life in the collaboration between Opposition and Lorenzo, and that the two work well together. Whether it’s a one-off or an ongoing project with a follow-up will remain to be seen, but with their first LP, they show the potential for a gruesome craft they can continue to make their own should they decide to do so.
Vessel of Light, “Son of Man” official video
Vessel of Light on Thee Facebooks
Argonauta Records on Thee Facebooks
Tags: Argonauta Records, New Jersey, Ohio, Vessel of Light, Vessel of Light Woodshed, Woodshed
