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Review & Track Premiere: Vessel of Light, Thy Serpent Rise

Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on November 20th, 2019 by JJ Koczan

vessel of light thy serpent rise

[Click play above to stream Vessel of Light’s cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Wasp.’ Their third album, Thy Serpent Rise, is out now.]

With that title and that artwork, is there any way it’s at all possible, even in the remotest of distant universes, that the “serpent” in question in Vessel of Light‘s Thy Serpent Rise isn’t a cock? Not in this genre, folks. The lines from “Rush of Blood” — you’ll never guess where the blood is going — read, “You make my serpent rise/When you stare into my eyes” before transitioning into the chorus, “I feel a rush of blood/And a rush of drugs/Coursing through my veins/The fire and the flood,” and indeed: cock. By then, the New Jersey/Ohio outfit founded by guitarist Dan Lorenzo (Hades, Non-Fiction) and vocalist Nathan Opposition (né Jochum) and now featuring Jimmy Schulman (also Hades and Dan Lorenzo‘s solo band) on bass and Ron Lipnicki (ex-Overkill) on drums have run through a tight trio of songs for a post-intro opening salvo to Thy Serpent Rise, finding a sound on an aggressive end of the spectrum of traditional doom and heavy rock and roll, Opposition‘s sometimes guttural vocals upping the metallic quotient amid mostly AA/BB rhyme scheme murder and death poetry lyrics. “Rush of Blood” is something of an aberration, if a still-kinda-violent one.

The band’s second long-player behind last year’s Woodshed (review here) and a 2017 self-titled EP (review here) — both released by Argonauta Records — Thy Serpent Rise is comprised of 12 tracks with the title-track intro at the outset and two other guitar-based interludes, titled “Skin in the Game” and “Hello Darkness” interspersed throughout, the latter appearing just before the finale duo of “Decomposing Mental Health” and “After Death.” Ending with “After Death” of course seems fair enough after opening with “Abandon Life,” as the death fetish comes to define the point of view from which the songs stem, and as Opposition leans back and forth between suicide on “After Death” and “Decomposing Mental Health” and murder on “Meet and Bone” and “Bleed into the Night” — the latter of which boasts some ’90s-era Marilyn Manson-style “hey!” shouts in its later moments — the territory should be familiar to anyone who’s followed Vessel of Light at all, walking the fine line as it does between cultish and silly-cultish.

But though the words are the kinds of things that would’ve gotten you suspended from your junior year of high school for furiously scribbling in your notebook during class — picture Vice Principal Ludwig, horrified — there’s no question that Thy Serpent Rise is a figuring-it-out point for Vessel of Light. As the band expands beyond just Lorenzo and Opposition, their songwriting seems to tighten, such that the cuts in that initial push, “Abandon Life,” Meet and Bone” and “Urge to Kill,” barely top three minutes in the longest of them, but are strikingly efficient in getting the message across and still conveying a sense of darkness in the atmosphere. As with Woodshed, hooks about, and even if Opposition is consistent in rhyme scheme, he is a singer of marked presence whose voice is a distinguishing factor here and across his entire discography.

vessel of light

As “Save My Soul” emerges in bluesy swinging fashion from “Skin in the Game,” he adjusts his approach subtly to ride the groove behind him in order to enhance it rather than contradict, working with the band and not against them with what might be the album’s most uptempo vibe, though oddly enough “After Death” might give it some competition in that regard. Contrast that either way with the slamming weight of “Eternal Sleep,” the stomping force of which is a highlight unto itself as the band drive home the more metal side of their sound in a way that feels natural and intended for the stage. Following “Hello Darkness,” “Decomposing Mental Health” has more of a rolling nod and is a welcome arrival for that, as Lorenzo‘s riff changes are telegraphed around a chorus that would seem to be a point at which Vessel of Light come into their own and establish their identity in this grim mood, a kind of exploration of troubled self lyrically accompanied by choice, straightforward motion, clear, full production and structures that are tight to a point of feeling like they’re about to snap, which as it happens only suits the lyrics all the more, since that’s basically what Opposition would seem to be shooting for as well. Nice when things work out like that.

Are Vessel of Light going to be universally appealing? Nope. Their style finds them in a place between larger genre scopes, hard to pin to one thing or the other, and their report-this-post lyrics are anything but friendly to the listener. But of course, neither are they intended to be universal. It’s now what they’re going for now and not what they’ve been going for over the last two years as they’ve worked quickly to establish themselves and develop this aesthetic. At just 34 minutes — compared to Woodshed‘s 41 — the brevity suits Thy Serpent Rise, and the down-to-business intensity toward which Lorenzo and Opposition steer the material is effective and feels hammered out on a professional level.

What’s the endgame? Who the hell knows. But as Vessel of Light explore the elements that make up their sound, they seem to have with Thy Serpent Rise to have found the balance they were looking for their last time out, which sets them up for a third album should they get there that’s all the more sure of where it stands. At least that’s the narrative I’m going with. That’s not to say the record isn’t without its drawbacks — I’ll come out and say it if it’s not already clear; the lyrics aren’t really my thing, though they’re well performed and carried through with conviction; I just have a hard time believing anyone that into murder isn’t either in jail or too busy killing people to make records about it — but the “Skin in the Game” is as much the band’s own as it is whoever’s face they’re wearing like a mask, and in putting it all on the line, they at very least offer an alternative interpretation to the sense of “rising” in the title on a meta-level, if not one directly in the song itself, which, well, yeah, is about cock.

Vessel of Light, “Meet and Bone” official video

Vessel of Light on Thee Facebooks

Vessel of Light on Instagram

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