ALBUM REVIEW: Mundus – Ancient VVisdom
For the first time in their career, Ohio occult rockers ANCIENT VVISDOM find themselves bringing out an album with the same label as the previous one. The band who began life releasing a split 12″ with famed murderer Charles Manson have gone through Withdrawal, Shinebox, Prosthetic and Magic Bullet over the last ten years and found themselves on Italy’s Argonauta to release 2017’s 33. Now, their sixth album Mundus, a Latin term for ‘the world’, is the next chapter in their doom-laden ritual.
Although Ohio itself is in the north east of America, those who might be experiencing ANCIENT VVISDOM for the first time would be forgiven that it’s in the South given the tinge to the SABBATH-influenced guitars that greet the opening to lead single Human Extinction or the laid-back tempo that flows through the record. Don’t think for one moment this is going to turn into songs about nostalgia or patriotism though, because as soon as vocalist Nathan Opposition opens his mouth, so do the gates on a dark and brooding journey via the medium of a band using their talents to make a stand against the nefariousness that plagues the planet. Unlike many bands of their ilk, there is a hefty dose of acoustic guitar woven in which, whilst certainly softening the overall tone, doesn’t detract from the dreary foundations that ANCIENT VVISDOM have firmly planted. Plague the Night and Will to Destroy are two such examples, with Opposition‘s low, sultry bass vocals inciting firm memories of Peter Steele and thus bringing a lovely gothic flavour to proceedings.
Given the high consistency of Mundus, an unintentional way that the band have managed to get across their message is that the tracks containing electric guitars seem almost in a war against the acoustic numbers for supremacy. When Plague the Night finishes, the electrics respond with the stomp of I Am Everywhere and answer Will to Destroy with the brooding and downtrodden For the Glory of the Grave, a seven-and-a-half minute epic that does much to increase the immersive experience that Mundus seeks to achieve. It’s the acoustic tracks which have the final say though in Edge of the Abyss, which brings the album to a suitably melancholic conclusion. As Oppostion sings “Life wasn’t meant to be angels singing death to me“, the view that those who are meant to look after us in their positions of power are instead choking the lives from the folk on the ground hits home like a well-aimed petrol bomb and, for all the gloom, incites a small spark of anger that, for whatever reason, this has been allowed to happen in the first place.
As far as their crusade against the global orders goes, it might take a monumental shift for ANCIENT VVISDOM to have their songs played far and wide. But if Greta Thunberg can turn a solitary stand for climate change into a world movement, then this band can as well, and in Mundus they have a weapon with so much firepower held within its depressive walls that all it will take is a small spark and everyone will listen. This is a wonderful album from a band with a lot to offer.
Rating: 8/10
Mundus is out now via Argonauta Records.
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