ALBUM REVIEW: Precipice – Veilcaste

Hailing from the United States’ Midwest, VEILCASTE bill themselves as “a spacey doom metal band“. True enough, their previous material has been rich with smokey, bluesy, fuzzy doom riffs while vocalist Dustin Mendel yells into the abyss. Even before 2020 when they went by the name CONJURER (presumably changed because a certain group of British sludge savants stole it), their debut album displayed a band that had found their sound. Now they’ve teamed up with Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room for mastering, who has previously plied his trade to the likes of YOB, COUGH and PELICAN. As a result, Precipice carries all the ingredients to be an absolute firestorm of emotive doom heavier than a black hole.

Drag Me Down pits melodic guitar lines furnished with a vocal performance that starts out on the edge of Gregorian chanting, against a continuous roll of bottomless-pit bass and menacing drums create an intimidating picture. It’s headbanging good fun and blasts out of the gates at maximum velocity, burning up like a meteor piercing the Earth’s atmosphere. For Us builds on this with a guitar tone thicker than tar and directs that same meteor straight at your cranium, giving Precipice its highlight, as well as the album’s heaviest moment.

These songs really do feel like the correct sum of their parts, and you can hear that same red thread of doom dominance that’s been laced through the scene and the always-worked-withs of the production. It’s a shame then that the record starts with Asunder Skies, which is bold in its ambitions, but is ultimately a song that winds up feeling far longer than its six-and-a-half-minute runtime. It’s largely down to its meandering passages that seem to be searching for a way into the next phase, but vocally too, the material feels tired and flat. The drawn out yells of “Au…ror…rah” do nothing to help their case, as Mendel almost sounds disinterested in his delivery.

To that point, the majority of Precipice feels as if the vocals were written and recorded before any of the instrumentation, and feels very one-note. Save for certain miniscule windows, you could randomly select any point of this record and likely hear the same delivery pattern on the same note. As mentioned, VEILCASTE are very much a band that have found their sound and are sticking to it, but across the 40 minutes of this album, it becomes a bit bothersome. Even some of the more enjoyable tracks like Dust And Bone – which is neck-snappingly good fun and features Precipice’s catchiest chorus – suffers from a bizarre mix that puts the guitars so far forward that everything else becomes washed out. Granted, the riffs are what carry this track, but when the rest of the band feel like an afterthought, it raises a few questions.

All told, Precipice is a decent homage to cosmic and stoner doom at its best, but laborious and mediocre at its worst. A tragic case of all the pieces working on paper, but sorely lacking in execution. Not VEILCASTE‘s finest hour.

Rating: 5/10

Precipice is set for release on February 10th via Wise Blood Records.

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