Vit – -

August 18, 2010 • Music Ruins Lives

I don't remember how I came across Ohio band Vit, but I've had this album kicking around in my library without rating it for two years, so it's time it got its due. And it's now understandable how this happened: there is a weird class of albums that aren't quite good and aren't quite bad and I can never really get my head around them enough to analyze them; - is definitely one of those albums.

Vit plays a pretty diverse sort of black metal, taking influences from both the first and second waves, injecting it with plenty of doomy and folky tendencies as well, with some cool extras like the banjo in "Ascension Ritual" and the folky interludes such as that in "Perennial Collapse". But Vit never really feels like they know what kind of music they want to play, making - feel a bit disjointed—there is a definite shift each track between different styles of metal (specifically, the odd-numbered tracks are black metal and the even-numbered ones are doom, aside from the last one—it's pretty weird).

The songwriting is definitely the key weakness on this album; the band has good ideas but doesn't seem to know how to put them together in a way that makes a whole lot of sense, leaving the listener lost more often than should happen. The aesthetic and performance is there, and that's all fine, but the music can still be a bit tough to listen to. The songs don't have much in the way of compositional dynamics (no buildups/climaxes), which is normally not a problem but I feel like this album seems a bit bland without them.

It's not a bad debut, and I really want to like Vit, but they have a ways to go from here. I haven't heard their more recent EP, so all of this might be completely pointless, but as it stands this album is worth a listen—just one without raised expectations.

5