VRENTH – Succumb To Chaos / VINYL LP / CD JEWELCASE

Among the most respectable yet well-forgotten oral traditions yet extant on record the knowledge of one’s hour of death was often a given, a harrowing gift shared among all men which’d balanced harshly with the realities of a determinant judgement day, a living trial at the final moments of life with an extended execution phase in mind. The uncertainty of Death’s calling, the unknown hour, was a gift of mercy bestowed by the ‘Gods’ after long witness of just how cruelly the penalty would hang over the frail. Today when we learn of death in nascence it shouldn’t necessarily read as chaos (an even more complex, personalized definition) by instinct but through experience we learn to accept that our mortality is randomly generated excepting particularly targeted circumstance. Science is not on our side in this regard, the idea that death and chaos would unite in definition is rough considering the well-observed nature of thermodynamics has us too hastily considering a cold, dead nothing as the ‘final’ state of carbon-based matter. Where I see chaos and Death aligning most clearly is obvious enough, though, as we consider the process of putrefaction which may or may not involve the glorious parasitic feasting of insects and bacterium. As we succumb, accept and carry with us the notion that the inevitable may very well strike upon us as a fiery lightning bolt (into fleshy, worm-ridden globs) at any given moment we nonetheless find no remedy for the inevitable feelings of finitude, a purposelessness upheld in any reality-based rationalization. These are warranted sensations and they should be relished, as the path to this point of sentience is rarely so honest, or allowed to be felt within the gears of the shit-spraying and poisoned apparatus of society. Away from the world, in bunkers and darkness southern California-based ‘old school’ death metal quintet Vrenth persist in their imaginative strain of nihil and morbid philosophic obsession with this phenomenon of finitude and rot, now landing their latest grotesquely lucid observations for the sake of this second full-length album within just a few years. ‘Succumb to Chaos‘ appears to marvel at disintegration and celebrate the mayhem which feeds death alike as the wailing and riff-wielding crew extend their elite oeuvre unto an impossible standard of morose death metal craft.