Artist: Vadhakarmadhikarin
Country: India
Label: Final Agony
Formats: LP
Year: 2025
While a lot of Extreme Metal is made in a few countries or continents with a long and lively history in this sort of music, some things do come from the most unlikely of places. In recent years, say, the last decade or so, there is an increasing amount of bands coming from India or even Sri Lanka and surrounding countries. Not the very first places you’ll think of when you’re looking for the extremest of extremes, but statistically speaking, it is not surprising that a country like India with a population of nearly 1.5 billion should also have particularly interesting Extreme Metal.
Take Vadhakarmadhikarin for instance. This trio’s music is as easy to digest as their band name is to pronounce. What’s for dinner is a downright horrendous piece of War Metal-influenced Blacknoise; in no less than 42 minutes ‘Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan’ sends you on a one-way trip to hell. A constant barrage of pummelling drums and a jumble of riffs and roaring vocals make this one of the prime examples of this particular genre’s lunacy.
Musically, this is best described as rabid, stampeding variant of Revenge. As if it were a drunken Revenge rehearsal in which they forgot to agree on the order in which the songs should be played. Total chaos. At least, for the untrained ear this will be utter chaos and nothing else. However, if you’d take the time to really try to wrap your head around it, you’ll hear that although the tracks evolve around similar patterns, there’s much more than meets the ear.
Vadhakarmadhikarin serves itself with surprisingly familiar Bestial Black/Death Metal structures, even with the same sort of guitar texture. Consequently, ‘Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan’ will definitely appeal to those who have a knack for bands like Tetragrammacide, Nyogthaeblisz or even Deiphago but do not shy away for some challenge. Maybe the most interesting, though, is when the band slows down a bit and add a good portion of Pseudogod-like doomy heaviness to the mix, giving it a nice extra dimension to the whole album.
Despite being a little long, consequently offering another challenge to the unsuspecting listener, ‘Tejashvi Akramakh Validaan’ definitely is a genre highlight. It’s a fairly exclusive genre anyway where fans can only look forward to a few good releases a year, but when there finally is one… then we are extra ecstatic. Let’s call it acquired taste.
