Review Summary: The most extreme doom metal release of all time? This utterly shocking and horrific album holds some of the most genuinely scary music ever committed to tape.
Drone, doom and noise have often gone hand-in-hand when it comes to appearing on albums but the most horrific marriage of all three is to be found on this debut album by Norwegian (and Irish?) band, Vonn. I only recently rediscovered this album (almost a decade after it first surfaced and sort of passed me by) and there has been a hell of a lot of extreme music pushed out in that time, but it surpasses anything I have ever heard in terms of sheer extremity. It's down in part to the nihilistic abrasiveness of the music itself and in part to the fact that this album offers one track that clocks in at a little over 76 minutes. (Dutch doom crew Bunkur must be mentioned here simply because their second album, Nullify, which came out three years after Victim One: Agony offered one track at 77 minutes long, which at the time and even now seems to me to be a simple case of a band forcing themselves to 'go one better' than what was aready out there purely to have the longest track out there). As it stands, Nullify doesn't pack half the punch that Victim One does, mainly down to the don't-give-a-*** attitude of the Norwegians who created the Vonn debut and the almost contrived and ultimately inferior effort of the Dutch. Victim One: Agony is very tough going; harsh on the ears and the mind, it's apparently the point of the whole exercise. The band stated in their press release at the time that 'true' doom music should be an aural representation of the dread and terror that someone would feel if they were in actual fact meeting their own doom. They didn't care that it was a difficult and almost unbearable listen. To them that was the whole point and to force yourself to last the duration was to experience the sonic equivalent of true doom. The harsh vocals found on this are that of a woman screaming in terror and reports at the time suggested that these were the actual recordings of a female being tortured specifically for this project. Whether that is completely true or not, disturbing images of this torture were supposedly doing the rounds for a few years after the release of the album, with some people claiming to have been sent some by the band when they purchased the album. When it comes to unbearably extreme 'music' Vonn have it sewn up. There is seemingly no structure to proceedings but there is a very strong atmosphere here. It's a truly scary piece of work that might be hard to get through, although that it surely the point. Apparently this was lauded by some as the most extreme doom metal on the planet when it came out, but to-date I have yet to find anything that matches it on those terms. I can say with some degree of certaintly that this remains the most extreme recording I have ever heard, so that tag seems quite correct to me. It's not nice and it's not pleasurable, it's just some of the most ***ed up music ever commited to tape. Not for casual listening but very rewarding (and disturbing) for those who czn sit it out. Ther closing 5 minuts or so are some of the best and creepiest/scariest I have ever heard.
