Vulture Industries: The Tower

The crazy sound of the frozen, fractured North

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Potential poster boys for Norwegian underground metal’s mentally unhinged brigade, Vulture Industries take such a wildly idiosyncratic approach to making music that they seem to exist in perfect isolation from the rest of their native scene. The Tower is proudly, persistently and irresistibly deranged – an amalgam of numerous strands of oddball extremity, quirky leftfield art rock and abstruse theatricality.

Aside from an occasionally perceptible core of post-Arcturus prog experimentalism, it is this band’s dizzying array of ideas and influences that makes songs like The Hound and A Knife Between Us so intensely compelling, with nods to everyone from Nick Cave and Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell through to assorted post-punk and gothic rock adding myriad unfamiliar shades to the heady brew of discordant riffs, analogue keys and singer Bjørnar Nilsen’s distinctive, tremulous baritone.

With stunning artwork thrown in, this is a brilliantly realised journey into madness.

Dom Lawson
Writer

Dom Lawson began his inauspicious career as a music journalist in 1999. He wrote for Kerrang! for seven years, before moving to Metal Hammer and Prog Magazine in 2007. His primary interests are heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee, snooker and despair. He is politically homeless and has an excellent beard.