Underground French black metal band Mourning Forest is back with their new album De La Vermine and to say it bluntly……. It’s your basic black metal album. It sounds like it’s been recorded in a serial killers shed, is jammed full of pig squeals and is as scary as your mums face! With nine crusty quite progressive black metal tunes on one album it’s a shame that De La Vermine drags on a bit because there are some really good ideas on this album it’s just they are bogged down by a load of filler.

Apart from the track ‘A Dead Sun’ and the outro and intro, you would need to be an A level French student to understand what any of the song titles, but that aside tracks like ‘A Travers Les Yeux Du Vide’, ‘Cortege Funebre’ and ‘Nourris Les Corbeaux’ are great generic black metal tracks – sounding raw and atmospheric while still sounding aggressively brutal at the same time. The only problem is it is just another black metal album. Nothing particularly shines about this album, sure what Mourning Forest have done is good, but there is nothing on De La Vermine that sets this album apart from any other black metal album that has been released this year.

The guitar riffs are the best part of this album and it’s these which make this album so brutally heavy. Taking quite oddly a faster approach to black metal, Mourning Forest power through tracks like ‘Lamentations D’un Pendu’, ‘Entre Terre Et Poussiere’ and ‘A Dead Sun’ delivering fast staccato beats to form a hybrid of blackened speed metal.  There is so much melody on this album. Melody in black metal you say. Yes, the riffs are the melody line on this album and will easily get you humming along in no time.

De La Vermine has an outstanding album artwork and kind of reminds me of The Black Plague. It’s set out more or less like a tapestry – depicting skeletons playing various medieval instruments surrounding a witch doctor who is wearing “The Crow Mask” which was used during the times of the Plague. It’s a great concept to bass this album around, and by including the word Vermine (which could be French for vermin) in the title of the album, I can only assume that Mourning Forest where trying to do a concept album based around this point in history.

I wouldn’t urge you to go out and buy this album if you aren’t into black metal, but if you are a huge black metal head who likes splintering guitar lines, driving drum fills and demonic vocals, then you definitely need to give Mourning Forest’s new album De La Vermine a listen! [6/10]