Vastum - Patricidal Dust (2013)

   There have been 2 frequently returning trends at newly formed bands in the underground scene from the late '00s, as it was often mentioned before. By the New Wave Of Old School Death Metal, plenty of bands showed up to rediscover and recall the feeling of the early '90s death metal scene. And there was a wider tendency too, that was focusing on musical minimalism by operating with only basic themes and making sound as their main priority. In Vastum's music, both trends seemed to show up intensively, but it's debatable how intentional and how advantageous steps they have they been. 

  Old school orientation could validate to live with very simple and basic themes, and this usually worked out well in other styles, like in stoner/doom, when drone metal was taken as an influence. And that instantly led to the importance of the depths of noisy sound. But In case of old school death metal, oversimplified themes could lead to total boredom. Even though death metal is notorious about it's primitive approach, even most of its basic themes used to be more technical than thrash or black metal themes. The very simple themes that could be heard in Vastum's music are more remindig to Impetigo, which band switched from punk to death metal, and even though they've also earned some cultic status, somehow they didn't become too influential. Vastum also didn't seem to intend referring to Impetigo, since they did pay attention on sound and production quality, such as on the quality of the album art (the album art was most possibly painted by Paolo Girardi, his characteristic style is easy to identify). The analogy happened because of the oversimplified themes, but in tempo they also didn't go for diversity, the occasional speed ups didn't even reach thrash speed. The "eventless" drum play makes the monotonous feeling even more severe. It might fit well to AC/DC, but not into death metal. The positive sides of the album that came mainly from the production, basically got neutralized by the poor musical performance.