Vadhakarmadhikarin – Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan

While a lot of Extreme Metal is made in a few countries or continents with a long and lively history in this sort of music, some things do come from the most unlikely of places. In recent years, say, the last decade or so, there is an increasing amount of bands coming from India or even Sri Lanka and surrounding countries. Not the very first places you’ll think of when you’re looking for the extremest of extremes, but statistically speaking, it is not surprising that a country like India with a population of nearly 1.5 billion should also have particularly interesting Extreme Metal.

Take Vadhakarmadhikarin for instance. This trio’s music is as easy to digest as their band name is to pronounce. What’s for dinner is a downright horrendous piece of War Metal-influenced Blacknoise; in no less than 42 minutes ‘Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan’ sends you on a one-way trip to hell. A constant barrage of pummelling drums and a jumble of riffs and roaring vocals make this one of the prime examples of this particular genre’s lunacy.

Musically, this is best described as rabid, stampeding variant of Revenge. As if it were a drunken Revenge rehearsal in which they forgot to agree on the order in which the songs should be played. Total chaos. At least, for the untrained ear this will be utter chaos and nothing else. However, if you’d take the time to really try to wrap your head around it, you’ll hear that although the tracks evolve around similar patterns, there’s much more than meets the ear.

Vadhakarmadhikarin serves itself with surprisingly familiar Bestial Black/Death Metal structures, even with the same sort of guitar texture. Consequently, ‘Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan’ will definitely appeal to those who have a knack for bands like Tetragrammacide, Nyogthaeblisz or even Deiphago but do not shy away for some challenge. Maybe the most interesting, though, is when the band slows down a bit and add a good portion of Pseudogod-like doomy heaviness to the mix, giving it a nice extra dimension to the whole album.

Despite being a little long, consequently offering another challenge to the unsuspecting listener, ‘Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan’ definitely is a genre highlight. It’s a fairly exclusive genre anyway where fans can only look forward to a few good releases a year, but when there finally is one… then we are extra ecstatic. Let’s call it acquired taste. (FelixS)

— — —

They say ‘whatever is happening in the world when you’re born, is completely natural to you. Whatever happens between you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and you could probably make a career out of it. Whatever happens after you’re 35, is against the natural order of things and is only causing harm to others’. The saying is aimed at everyone, but in this case I’m going to focus on metalheads of all sorts (after all, I’m writing a review of a metal record here). Considering the average metalhead these days is around 50 years old (undergoing the second divorce, pays alimony for three kids, used to play in a local band and has a substance abuse issue) and was a teenager when metal first got introduced to wider masses, to them metal should sound as it sounded when they were a teen and anything new introduced in the world of metal is against the law and as such, should be immediately violently eradicated.

Heavy metal has transformed throughout the ages and the underground is usually focused on being ‘the most brutal thing in existence’ at the moment when it’s created. What we understand was the ‘proto heavy metal’ in the mid 60’s when it started taking its shape, is widely regarded as ‘pop rock’ today. The still active bands from mid 80’s, which todays underground is based around, are considered boring, dull and unimaginative nowadays. Every generation of metal as a genre was aiming at being more violent than its predecessor and changes happening in it are consequences of its evolution. The natural order of things.

Why am I pointlessly blabbering about evolution when I was telling you I’m reviewing a record? Vadhakarmadhikarins full length is, in my opinion one of those ‘horrible evolutionary changes’ traditional metalheads will diss as being mere noise and as such, it should not even be called Metal. But, it is. This is one of the most violent things I’ve heard in my life (and trust me, I’ve stuffed a lot of things in my ears since I was a teen), but it still can’t just be regarded as noise as there is so much more to it. You press play and you’re thrown into an ‘aural detonation’ for the next 42 minutes. What was once regarded to as ‘Bestial Black Metal’ has been added a generous amount of noise, sped up

Every detonation releases immense power and that power has to culminate somewhere as energy does not come out of nothing and doesn’t return to nothing. If you’re strong enough (physically and more important, mentally), you’ll receive it and will use it properly. If you’re not strong enough, you’ll describe it as noise and pretend it didn’t affect you anyhow.

So far I have learned I can always count on Kolkata Inner Order Propaganda to deliver the albums which are on the edge between being too much (too violent, too brutal, too chaotic, too whatever)… or I might just be building my immunity to it (if it continues at this rate, I might soon become resistant to bullets) and loving every absolutely destructive second of it. After all, one of the names of this band can be translated as ‘the executioner’, which could also mean the metalheads mentioned in the first paragraph should take their sleeping pills and let the younger boys take over, if they are not capable of joining them. (Black Mary)