VERFÜHRERVERGELTER - The Further Regions Of Sound

 Released: March 5

This latest album from VERFÜHRERVERGELTER keeps well in line with his previous work in terms of the dark and industrial aesthetic. But there’s a lot more going on that just some weird industrial noises. Each track is strikingly unique here, never trying the same audible tricks as we move through compositions. There’s some really rather novel ones here as well, which stood out among the others. Of particular interest for me was the intense and rather cerebral “Nerve.” It feels some ultimately unsettling as we hear labored and wheeze-filled breathing alongside tense noise synths oscillating and warbling about wildly. But it’s really the breathing that solidifies the atmosphere. It’s so perfectly captured, feeling ragged and inject a tense feeling that is just incredibly visceral. 

Essentially every piece of this album is quite noisy and unnerving, except for the peculiarly calm first track “15mg of Shame. In the larger context of the album, it feels like misdirection with a gentle plucked guitar bouncing around in the stereo field. It;s calm and quiet nature comes off as a bit eerie and foreboding, even without knowing the rest of the album, but it still feels like it contrasts with the rest in a rather curious way. We don’t get another track with the same level of eerie calm, but the closest we come to is the seething five minutes of “I escaped but mentally I’m still there.” The pulsing distorted tones persist in this track and are only occasionally broken by the icy sound of metal clattering on concrete. 

It’s all very dark throughout, as you might expect from VERFÜHRERVERGELTER, but the extremes of his experimentation are more pronounced here. The variation in the sounds are wild and the unexpected themes kept me listening. About mid-way through the album, we come into some more convention “wall of sound” types of compositions - ones the threaten to become overbearing like “Trial by Fire” before being broken by the short tonal screaming of “Apocalypso” - but these fall far short of defining the album, instead allowing the more weird and sparse pieces to make more of a splash. It’s morose at times, but also quite engaging with plenty of unexpected themes.