Review by Felix on December 27, 2022.

It’s a fine line between primitive yet good music and primitive music which is... just primitive. Vampyric Tyrant want to play in the league of Frosten, Úlfarr or even Meuchelmord, but their EP from 2022 shows that this is not their biotope. Lifeless, robotic drumming meets pretty meaningless melody fragments. The production tastes like underground, but this is no value in itself. Here I must translate “underground” with spiritless, predictable and muddy. That’s a pity, because the wolfish howling of the lead vocalist has its charm (and a lot of reverb on it), but this element alone does not make a good EP.

Despite these difficult circumstances, I have found at least one acceptable number here. The title track profits from well integrated keyboards that give the previously meandering guitar lines orientation without creating a saccharine or sterile aura. I do not speak about a new classic of the genre, but this song shows a certain degree of compositional talent. Anyway, compared with the highlights of other black metal outputs, the song remains quite tasteless.

And things get worse. The almost romantically titled 'Ein Traum' delivers a lost-in-thought instrumental nobody needs. Only a guitar appears and plays boring tones. Will the crude vision of EPs as a kind of field of experimentation never die? Anyway, the two remaining tracks also do not enrich the scene sustainably. 'Totschlag' tries to leave a good impression due to its comparatively high number of breaks and tempo shifts. Some sections are okay, but a massive kick in the teeth sounds different. 'Vereinsamung', to close the cycle, stands for a lot of things I do not like in black metal, for example tired mid-tempo rhythms, useless keyboards and little elaborated guitar lines. Of course, minimalism is no shame, but the result should work – and unfortunately, this is not the case here. Thus, a few good approaches are present here, but all in all, Zorn Und Hass is neither radical nor high sophisticated and it cannot compete with the vast majority of other underground black metal outputs.

Rating: 4.2 out of 10