VVOV - Pohja
Review by KIZUNAUT
VVOV is a Finnish band that explores the darker-than-black territories lying between darksynth, EBM extreme metal, calling their style “blackened darksynth”. The singular vision behind VVOV is a man going by the name The Vessel, and over the years this vision has grown to incorporate a bassist, a guitarist and a drummer. Time has also seen VVOV shift more towards extreme metal from darksynth while retaining harsh synth sounds associated with the genre. Darksynth has always had a love affair with extreme metal but few have gone as far to that direction as VVOV have gone, eschewing the cyberpunk and horror movie tropes for a more visceral, philosophic, misantrophic type of darkness.
The very prolific band has since 2018 released four albums, two EPs and a heapful of singles. Besides their gradual stylistic evolution, time has also seen VVOV shift towards the Finnish language in track names and lyrics, a process that began with the 2020 album Marto. While Marto had some content in English, Pohja is all in the band’s native language. The new album’s name has a double meaning, translating to either “The Bottom” or “The North”, both of these meanings extremely fitting for the material found within.
Thematically Pohja deals with misanthropy, suffering, anti-natalism and nihilism, with a poetic, somewhat archaic flavor that draws from Finnish poetry and literature. At times it gives the album a tone of an overburdened peasant cursing his miserable existence, at times the pain and hate are of more timeless nature. The album’s mixture of timeless agony mixed with cold, mechanical delivery feels like it taps from a dark, archaic undercurrent of Finnish history, a country that has suffered harsh conditions, famines, wars, only to move into industrialization and modernity at accelerated pace without dealing with the chains of generational trauma built over the centuries in any meaningful way. This character of the album probably does not get relayed to the people outside of Finland very well, which is a bit of a shame. Some cultural artifacts are really only possible to fully understand within their own cultural context, and I feel like this is one of such creations.
What does get relayed to everyone is the utter wrath and power behind the album. The vocal delivery of The Vessel is black metal influenced screeching, the synthetic blast beats hammer the listener with inhuman fury and the mix of synths, guitars, wailing choirs and sheer noise hits with bone-rending force. The production is potent and punchy, if rather treble heavy, a production choice that puts the “blackened” into the “blackened darksynth”. It’s neighborhood-peace-disturbingly loud, while retaining enough air and dynamics for the melancholic and/or menacing choirs and pads that populate many of the album’s tracks. My biggest production critique is that I found it rather heavy on the ears. The extreme loudness and glacial amounts of treble frequencies makes for an tinnitus-inducing experience in the long run. Maybe fans of more black metal oriented material will enjoy this more, or perhaps this is like Jägermeister, best taken in smaller doses.
Perhaps the somewhat grating nature of the production is a deliberate artistic choice. The album is utterly savage and sounds like it wants to rip your face off, with little concern for the more club-oriented aspects of darksynth. That isn’t to say that the album is just a sheer barrage of noise. There is detail, variation and structure within this hailstorm of an album, and most of the songs have different enough sonic character to stand out from each other. It’s like watching 2000 years of misery play out through a filter of a snowstorm.
The visual side of the album is spot on for the music found within, featuring a decaying skull at the bottom of the sea, with kelp, swords and human hands to be seen in the background, a rather literal translation of “The Bottom” aspect of the album. The rough, coarse style makes it look like an old woodcut print, emphasizing the more timeless, archaic aspects of the music and effectively communicating the more extreme metal aspect of this album.
Vaiva starts the album with a shrill, icepick sharp guitar/synth noise and a barrage of blastbeats, setting the tone for what is to come. The Vessel screeches over the barrage of drums and lacerating saw synths about the misery of life while. Passages of what sound like tremolo-picked guitars or tormented synths pop in and out. The song alternates between slower and faster sections, with the choruses slowing things a bit for a while. The latter half of the relatively brief song sees the addition of choirs to the whirling mass of sound and an instrumental section that ends in four drum hits ends the song.
Unta begins with a sequence of rapid, sharp saw-synths and a fast drumbeat, carrying seamlessly into the rapid-fire first verse of the song. The chorus of the song is a bit more melodic than that of the last one, featuring a squirming, distorted indeterminate instrument and mellow pads and a slower beat. Lyrically, one of my favorites from the album: “all of this is a dream, senseless, grotesque, only you exist and you are only a thought”, the lyrics of the chorus go roughly translated. The transition between the last chorus and outro features a rather cool brief guitar countermelody.
The next song, Rutto, borders on grindcore with it’s extreme speed and short length. VVOV crams a surprising amount of twists and turns into the one minute thirty nine second length of the song, opening with a synth riff reminiscent of hardcore punk, before moving into a different riff and a bit slower beat, only for the song to build into a wall of noise punctured by a brutalizing blastbeat, then moving into a melodic interlude, only for it all to repeat, except instead of an interlude we get a sample of someone coughing before the next track begins.
Kuivakäymälä has the honor of having the most memorable song name of the album (meaning something to the effect of Dry Outhouse in Finnish). A bit slower, moodier offering, it opens with the familiar blast of drums and harsh saw synths, but soon melancholic choirs join the song and hover over the brutal beats. The first blast of screeched lyrics comes in, and then gives way for a lengthy instrumental section which sees a distorted synth playing melody joining the melancholic choirs. “Human society, a simulacra of civilization, a copy of a copy of a copy, fragile, useless and hollow”, The Vessel declares in Finnish. Another blast of screeched lyrics follows, before another brief interlude that leads to the last repeat of it’s lyrics, the song then dying away in a surprisingly gentle piano melody. One of my favorites from the album for it’s sound and lyrics.
An extremely heavily effected scream that sounds like it’s rising from the bowels of hell opens up Mietteitä, a lyric-less interlude that really pushes the rapid-fire saw synths that are the band’s trademark sound to the forefront. Alternating between several different riffs and featuring a middle section with a neat synth arp pattern, the song is a cool slice of mostly instrumental synth-metal, featuring intermittent distant growls and screams.
Rotat begins with a bizarre rattling noise before moving to a cool, chugging section that features a pretty catch riff backed up by atmospheric synths. The verses have a more march-like beat and extra visceral vocal performance from The Vessel. The second chorus features an extra synth lead and leads into a fast interlude, with the same synth playing another melody, before joining in as another doubling instrument for the last repeat of the chorus. A brief passage of plucky square synths serves as the outro. Another favorite from the album.
Fateful organ pads herald the coming of Messias, another instrumental cut from the album. . A barrage of blast beats and spoken word samples advocating for voluntary extinction push the track into motion. If Mietteitä was very clearly drawing from metal, Messias is a bit more electronic influenced with it’s synth leads and choir pads. These sections alternate with more chaotic sections that draw more from extreme metal, featuring rolling blastbeats and chaotic, roiling synthlines.
Synty slows things a bit, opening with a churning riff with a synth lead dancing over it. The Vessel barks out lyrics about the misery of being born, and the track takes a more somber turn, with melancholic choirs looming in the background. The beat occasionally picks up pace, but the rest of the elements stay in place, giving the track a certain sense of a futile struggle. An interlude comes, picking up the pace a bit, throwing a guitar lead over a chuggy synth riff and rapid blast beats, before a somber piano line leads to a more frantic repeat of the song’s chorus.
Shrill, menacing leads, dark choirs and a drum roll kick off Sadisti, with a gut-wrenching screech leading to the main body of the track. A very menacing sounding song even among the material of the album, with a mix of rapid saw synths, choir pads and machinegun pace blast beats serving as the meat of the track. The Vessel barks about how humans are filled with hate for each other; “what could kill the evil, what kind of hell would take us in, the earth fills with the human scourge, proof of God’s sadism”. Straightforward, leaning heavily on the extreme metal and it would be right at home as a pure black metal track.
Tukahduta opens with a medium pace synth line that slowly opens up into one of the more melodic songs from the album while retaining the bone withering aggression displayed on the rest of the album. A fateful sounding mix of sharp saw basses, synth strings and powerful beats serve as the chorus of the song, with The Vessel screaming what constitute among the more abstract lyrics of the album: “Isolate, anchor, deceive, sublimate, put the pain into words, kill the time, blinded, forget”, they would be, roughly translated. The instrumental verses feature a very cool guitar melody and some neat rhythmic tricks. Structurally, it follows perhaps surprisingly a kind of inverted pop formula, with the chorus coming first, then the verse, then the chorus again, and through an interlude one last repeat of the chorus. The most memorable track of the album for me.
Reverb-drenched melancholic guitars like shattered glass open Pohja, the titular track and the last song of the album. Synths and beats join the guitars, only for a brief pause to follow, before the track explodes into furious life with a mix of pulverizing blast beats, chugging synth lines and distant choirs and melancholic guitars. The Vessel screams about the inevitability of humanity sinking in the metaphorical bottom. The lyrical expression soon gives way into just sheer screeching, which gives way to an interlude with mournful pads and choirs. Soon enough the track returns to life, and the section with lyrics follows, then the section with screaming, leading into an extended outro which sees new synth leads joining the frantic, roiling tidal wave of a song. One last bout of screamed lyrics leads into an outro featuring melancholic, atmospheric guitars before the song finishes and the album comes to a close.
Pohja is certainly not an album for everybody, but fans of extreme darksynth and metal will find music they’d enjoy within. The inspirations behind the album give it substance and sincerity that does perhaps not get perfectly translated across cultures, but it makes the album feel that at no point it is just edginess or extremeness for the sake of itself, but rather a powerful statement about the more miserable side of the human condition.
If nothing else, the album shows that you can elevate your music by taking a hard, honest look at your roots, a lesson that applies to genres far beyond the extreme metal flavored darksynth that VVOV serves us. Overall, VVOV is shaping up to be one of those bands with very unique inspirations and a style that stands out from the rest and one to follow if their style and substance interests you.
For more VVOV, visit vvov.bandcamp.com