Venusian Death Cell

Venusian Death Cell - Venus
No label. CDR. 11 copies.

Venusian Death Cell - Athair Spawn
No label. CDR


David Vora is to Heavy Metal what Hasil Adkins is to Rock ‘n’ Roll. He’s what the Ceramic Hobs would sound like if there was only one of them left and that person, probably drunk, possibly half crazed with drugs and rotting brain decided to make a career from playing nothing but Punk/Metal with a broken Gibson SG copy and a Bontempi organ.

VDC are a one man Irish Metal outfit [insert specific sub genre here and good luck with that] who has graced these pages for many years now. His unique take on all that is black, tattooed and ‘uuuurrgghh’ has made slim jiffy bags from Dublin the pride of the doormat. His is a world of crude hand drawn covers on ruled notepaper, guitars that sound like malfunctioning wood chippers, everything recorded straight to one microphone in David’s home studio. No mixing. No editing. Pure raw Irish Heavy Metal as heard through a tatty paper cone pumped straight in to your deaf lug earholes. Which to these ears is the best that Metal can offer. It’s heartwarming [check out his pean to Irish woman and search for a girlfriend in ‘Fines of the other World’], splenetic [thirty second one note guitar solo tracks] and raw in the rawest of raw forms. You may get off on Metallica riffing Anti Nowhere League and shoving your head in the bass bins down the local gig space but give me some of Vora’s stripped back condenser mic growling and I’m happier than a Metal fan on Metal Day. If such a thing exists which it probably does.

On' Venus' Vora throws the proverbial curve ball by ditching the drums, the horror film samples and recordings of him busking in Dublin, replacing them with heavy reverb and a whammy bar. Just Vora and his guitar playing either simple single note instrumental tunes that run to less than half a minute or Metal classics like the eponymous ‘Venusian Death Cell’ or the raucous ‘Moons’ with its painful guitar solo and lines like;

‘Moon is high
I say bye
I see its glare
On her hair
Moon makes me mad
Because I’m still bad
…
Exonerate her soul
I fuck her whole
Now a child is born’


‘Athair Spawn’ may yet prove to be Vora’s masterpiece. Back come the drums and the rawk and yes can it be true, do my ears deceive me, songs sung in Italian [‘Petrarch 189’] and Gaelic [the title track as played on an un-amplified electric guitar with a sloooow kick drum back beat and a solo made from five notes]. We get everything from full on growling vocal thrash to freeform guitar churn. ‘Jewish Blaspheme’ shows Vora’s distaste for animal sacrifice, ‘Dark Gold’ may include drum patterns as found on John Shuttleworth’s keyboard and is as wonky and blissful as anything I’ve heard since I put that Chow Mwng release away.

Eight tracks done and dusted in fifteen minutes flat.

I looked up VDC on Encyclopedia Metallum. At the bottom of the page there’s a link to ‘similar artists’ and when you click on it it says ‘No similar artist has been recognised yet’. That's because VDC are unique. They [he, David Vora] may never sell out stadiums or get to chuck tellys out of hotel windows [do they still do that with 50” 4K jobs?] but to a small number of fans he’s the best that Ireland has to offer.

I rest my [Motorhead stenciled] flight case.

davidvora10 [@] hotmail.com