Versatile - Les litanies du vide (2025)

With a moniker like Versatile, I think you're setting yourself up for certain expectations. Possibly disappointment, if you wind up with a rather typical, commodified sound, or perhaps victory if you're using that branding as an inspiration to head out as far as possible into broad and wild musical amalgamations. I won't say that this debut Les litanies du vide quite achieves the latter, but they definitely mix it up enough to the point where you're never going to get bored headbanging along to their industrialized black metal mash-up. I would compare them to their countrymen Borgne, whose new album I recently covered, but whereas that group simply filters its more conventional black metal sound through some mechanical beats and atmospheric keys, this one does embrace the 'industrial' element a little more boldly.

Lots of grooves; choppy, churning rhythms that feel machine-like or robotic in nature, but then smothered in the atmosphere of the chants, sirens, and sinister, thick rasped vocals. I'd almost liken this to Fear Factory if they'd had more of a black metal foundation than a death metal one. Perhaps The Kovenant is  a better comparison, but despite having a similar set of crazy costumes, Versatile is a little less quirky, and they're delivery is equivalent to the harshest and most serious material of those Norwegians. This album is also soaked in this menacing, Gothic personality, with lots of organ sounds that make you feel as if you're in some haunted house cosplaying as an assembly line. They would be far on the heavier side of a lineup at some European fetish/Goth/industrial festival. There is a little bit more of a dated techno vibe here, too, which might seem cheesy, but this band never plays it for laughs. They even go straight EBM in places, like "Ieshara", but even that is taken dead serious, and for such reasons the record doesn't devolve into the sort of aural circus that you usually associate with bands using the masks, gas masks, contact lenses, prosthetics and all such dressings.

I give the band points for being quite catchy, and having these loud walls of chugging guitars, drums, deep rasps and synthesizers all crashing into one another with a solid level of coherence. There are moments on this album where the heavier instruments drop away and it feels like a horror soundtrack, and others where they embrace a slightly more dissonant industrial metal sound circa Godflesh, though the vocals and the melodic organs and such offer majorly different vibes. It's definitely a muscular debut, and while its acceptance will (as always) rely heavily on the particular preferences of the metal audience towards the adjacent genres on parade, there was undoubtedly a good deal of effort in its writing and recording. The 'black metal' here is largely through some of the vocals, so I think this one's headed more towards rivet-heads that like the noisier guitars and pounding drums, but if your listening habits are open to something like a more brutal, and yes, rhythmically versatile alternative to Neue Deutsche Härte, without the moody male vocals, then have at it.

Verdict: Win [7.25/10]

https://versatilemetal.bandcamp.com/