Adversvm – Vama Marga Review

As Angry Metal Guy‘s resident funeral doom metal kitty, it’s usually my responsibility to clench my grubby murder mittens on all things slow and murky.¹ Lately, though, due to forces outside my control,² all the good stuff is usually grabbed by the time I even get to our promo sump. This time around, Vama Marga, the third album by German funeral doom quintet Adversvm, was staring me in the face with no takers! Funeral doom… with the keyboardist of Evoken, no less! So I investigated to see who covered them before, as their name sounded familiar, and I learned two things: 1) yours truly covered their debut, Aion Sitra Ahra, and 2) I was not very big on that album by any stretch of the imagination when it was only one guy in the band.

Thankfully, Vama Marga is an improvement over their debut, even with some hiccups of its own. “Emanation” echoes the same melancholy and dread that very early My Dying Bride and any-era Mournful Congregation ooze on a good (or overcast) day, but instead of lamenting about woe, sadness, and other happy, cheery thoughts, it’s esotericism, atmosphere, and an uncomfortable feeling that something terrible is about to take place at any given moment. That weird, icky feeling was brought on by Fabian Guschlbauer’s eerie guitar lines, which give a watery, slippery vibe that oozes creepiness toward the end of the track to full effect.

But it’s the getting to that point in the song that makes it difficult at points. Not that the journey there is bad, not by any means, but there’s still some fat to chew. On album highlight “Feind,” we’re treated to a beautiful Guschlbauer solo so soaring, so impactful, and so Mournful that Damon Good and company would kill to write and perform something that intriguing, but there are several minutes of pretentious footgazing to get there. “Vindex,” the longest song on here at over ten minutes, also suffers from staying in one place for too long with too much repetition in the first few riffs in the song’s first half. Only on “Sinistrum,” a relatively breakneck track that reminds me a bit of My Dying Bride’s “The Forever People” in spirit, avoids this fate by getting to the point as quickly as possible with very little dalliance.

Another massive hurdle comes in the fact that literally five of the ten songs on Vama Marga are instrumental interludes. I don’t mind when a band utilizes instrumentals to enhance or create a vibe, but only the eerie “Parinama” and parts of closer “Mölingssken” successfully accomplish this. The other three interludes feel like they’re there to pad the album out, and at 52 minutes, it already feels much, much longer than it actually is to the album’s detriment. If you’re going to do this, make sure you’re cutting out all the extraneously unnecessary elements, like the spoken word pieces that pepper the album, before committing to it.

But again, this is progress, and not what I imagined SB (now Sascha Borchard) would be capable of when Aion Sitra Ahra dropped five years ago. While the songs still don’t feel fully developed, at least there’s a sense of where things are headed now, and a clearer vision can be attained. With better tightening, I believe Adversvm will get there. Right now, it doesn’t quite nail that vibe dead-on yet. Maybe next time.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Moribund Records
Website: facebook.com/Adversvm
Releases Worldwide: June 23rd, 2023