Vehemency Vitsaus has never shown any signs of progression throughout their career and the debut album, Sielunmessu - released now after 7 years since their first demo - makes no difference: the band stays true to its lo-fi black metal standards and refuses to alter the way in which they have composed and played underground black metal since the early 2000s.

And this is what makes Sielunmessu a hard bite: the album sounds really bare and to-the-point without any studio gimmicks whatsoever, ensuring that those listeners who look for surprising elements from their black metal will look away right when they hear the first blast beats and buzzing guitar riffs of ”Kuolleen seurassa”. Bleak and cold melodies are provided from the beginning to the end - most perfectly executed in the climaxes of the eight-minute ”Ylösnousemus” and in the mid-tempo tunes of ”Haudalla” - and it takes multiple listens to discover and realize the ingeniousness of these five, long compositions, that are buried in the low fidelity production.

Ultimately, Sielunmessu is not the groundbreaking black metal record of the 2010s but it certainly doesn’t try to be one; quite the opposite, as is evident also in the graphic layout with very simple, gray images and paintings. Inho’s death-reeking lyrics are hard to decipher from the booklet but it all adds to the hard nature of this album: it is not for everyone and it takes some work and time to get into.