Album Premiere: VHS – For A Few Riffs More
The latest from VHS is a fascinating foray into Spaghetti Western death metal. Stream the full album right now.
Heavy metal and the lonesome desert sound go back a long ways. Metallica have long claimed The Ecstasy of Gold, Ennio Morricone’s classic composition from Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, as their own walkout music for decades. Bands like Chapel of Disease and Spiritworld have mined the moody depths of these Western Samurai tales to great and disappointing results, respectively. Now, VHS enters the fray with this surprise new LP, For A Few Riffs More. Here, the band presents their own twist on death metal by way of the American Southwest by way of Rome. Previous excursions have found this Thunder Bay trio exploring sword and sorcery films, vampire flicks, and, of course, hella horror movies. This time around, the band dials down the distortion and amps up the twang for a truly unique genre experiment.
Bandleader Mike Hochins had this to say about For A Few Riffs More “Anytime we are trying to do something different it usually starts off as a challenge and before we know it we have an entire album written in whatever weird style we try to tackle. In this case I had the entire album written and thought to myself there is no way that vocals will work on this but let’s try it anyway! For some reason it did work so now we have an amalgamation of spaghetti western sensibilities and gross death metal vocals”. For my money, this experiment works best with tracks like “A Grave for Every Bullet” and “These Bandits Are Evil Men”, both favor clever arrangements that pay tribute to Morricone while maintaining a space that neatly fits death vox. Highly recommended. Check out the full album here for your listening pleasure:
For A Few Riffs More drops August 30th. You can pick up CDs from Grand Vomit Productions and cassettes from Crucial Blast – out soon on both!
