The Black Dahlia Murder – Verminous – Green and Black Smoke Vinyl Record

Description

The Black Dahlia Murder – Verminous – Green and Black Smoke Vinyl Record

Verminous finds The Black Dahlia Murder refining the speed, melody and horror-soaked imagery that made the Michigan band a central force in modern melodic death metal. Originally released in 2020, the album is compact and relentlessly detailed: ten tracks move from razor-edged riffing to eerie interludes without losing the direct impact of a tightly sequenced metal record. Vocalist Trevor Strnad, guitarists Brian Eschbach and Brandon Ellis, bassist Max Lavelle and drummer Alan Cassidy sound intensely coordinated, yet the arrangements leave room for each player’s personality. The record’s decaying subterranean world gives that precision an especially vivid atmosphere.

The title track begins with a crawling, ominous introduction before the full band accelerates, establishing the album’s balance between menace and momentum. “Godlessly” pushes forward with rapid rhythmic changes and intertwined guitar lines, while “Removal of the Oaken Stake” turns vampire imagery into a concise burst of hooks and attack. Ellis’s lead work brings a bright, technically exact voice to the music, but the solos serve the songs rather than interrupting them. Eschbach’s rhythm guitar and Lavelle’s bass keep the harmonic movement substantial beneath the speed, and Cassidy’s drumming gives even the most crowded passages a readable shape.

“Child of Night” expands the dramatic range with a more patient opening and a strong melodic center. “Sunless Empire” then closes the first side by shifting between muscular riffs and passages that feel almost cinematic in scale. Strnad’s performance is crucial throughout: his high and low vocal extremes remain intelligible as emotional gestures even when the lyrics descend into insects, disease, murder and transformation. His writing uses grotesque subjects with wit and craft, building self-contained scenes rather than relying on interchangeable shock. That focus makes Verminous feel like a unified environment as well as a collection of songs.

The second side becomes still stranger. “The Leather Apron’s Scorn” draws on the mythology surrounding Jack the Ripper, “How Very Dead” delivers one of the album’s sharpest and most immediate attacks, and “The Wereworm’s Feast” combines monstrous imagery with quick melodic turns. The brief instrumental “A Womb in Dark Chrysalis” creates a necessary pocket of suspended tension before “Dawn of Rats” closes the record on a grander, apocalyptic note. The pacing is exceptionally efficient: no song overstays its purpose, and the interlude changes the listener’s perspective without breaking the album’s momentum.

This Metal Blade pressing presents Verminous on limited green and black smoke vinyl. The exact UPC distinguishes it from the separate nuclear-slime-green edition already represented in the Round Flat catalog. Verminous also carries lasting significance as the final Black Dahlia Murder studio album completed with Trevor Strnad before his death in 2022. That context adds weight, but the record needs no retrospective qualification to succeed. It is a focused, imaginative performance by a seasoned lineup, equally rewarding for listeners drawn to technical musicianship, classic melodic death metal vocabulary or the band’s unusually literate and macabre approach to storytelling.

Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic

Track Listing

Side A
Verminous
Godlessly
Removal of the Oaken Stake
Child of Night
Sunless Empire

Side B
The Leather Apron's Scorn
How Very Dead
The Wereworm's Feast
A Womb in Dark Chrysalis (Interlude)
Dawn of Rats