If you’re checking résumés, the New York quartet Vaura probably seems daunting. Two of its members, bassist Toby Driver and guitarist Kevin Hufnagel, have logged recent time in some of heavy metal’s more dense and complicated units. Hufnagel counters Luc Lemay in the relaunched version of Gorguts and plays guitar with perpetually knotty instrumental trio Dysrhythmia. Driver, meanwhile, is the mastermind of the ever-recondite Kayo Dot and a survivor of the wonderfully exploratory maudlin of the Well. The pedigree of the band’s other half—drummer Charlie Schmid and leader, vocalist and guitarist Josh Strawn—is less metallic but nevertheless impressive and important: They both played in the lightly gothic Religious to Damn. That band’s hypnotic rock mirrored, at least in part, Strawn’s chilling post-punk standouts in Blacklist. So, just how intricate and truculent can Vaura be?
No matter what the credits might suggest, The Missing—Vaura’s second album in as many years and first for Profound Lore—is not altogether intimidating, either stylistically or technically. Sure, there are blast beats and wave-of-treble black metal guitars. There’s some doom lurch and even a touch of industrial disorientation. And the compositions aren’t exactly simple. “Passage to Vice” is a Rube Goldberg contraption of rhythms, with pianos and drums, guitars and vocals bouncing off of one another at just the right angles and moments to bloom into a chorus. During a late-song break, “Incomplete Burning” sprints down a spiral staircase of complication, colorful riffs wrapping like quickly growing vines around the structure. The eight-minute closer moves through slinking post-rock and pulsing New Wave, with Strawn lifting lyrics liberally from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But there’s a core of incandescent pop at the center of The Missing, too, an anchor that pulls its songs together as Vaura bridges post-punk and black metal, feathered atmospherics and cavalier dexterity. Though The Missing is intense enough to remind you of its members’ respective histories, it is at times disarmingly catchy and surprisingly bright.
There’s perhaps no better summary of Vaura’s success here than “Passage to Vice”, a tune so metrically poised that every piece seems to move in reaction to another. But Strawn speak-sings his way through the verses and stretches out in the hooks. He handles the words with the sort of cool aplomb that suggests the best work of Pinback. Gloom notwithstanding, you’ll want to follow him through the various slinks and soars, to sing along. And there’s “The Fire”, which shrieks open after a lengthy introduction with the most aggressive guitar layers and drum blitzes on the album. The beat is heavy during the verses, but it flares upward as it enters the chorus, dual guitars retrenching the obsidian escalation—that is, the parts you’d normally expect to be the most abrasive and potentially off-putting only bolster Strawn’s exquisite refrain. It’s not a novel technique, as you can hear similar moves from most every atmospheric black metal act. It does, however, illustrate Vaura’s aim of accessibility on The Missing. Alternately, “Incomplete Burning” eases up on its torrent of drums and guitars as it enters the chorus, finding an unexpected middle point between metal and mid-90s college rock. It does not sound altogether unlike the Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy”.
Selenelion, Vaura’s very good 2012 debut, was a touch longer than The Missing, in part because it incorporated more disparate elements. There was downtrodden folk and a little Sonic Youth-style squall, unabashed deathrock homage, and a touch of tech-metal maul. It felt almost like a DJ mix of its members’ interests, pivoting from one look to another competently, but without too much worry about making it all work as a whole. The Missing not only better integrates these elements but dispatches with some of the more superfluous ones. There’s no folksy interlude, and there are no unnecessary solos. As the record pushes toward its more doleful back half, Strawn’s gothic past wedges toward the spotlight, especially on the excellent and gray “The Things That We All Hide”. It doesn’t feel abrupt. Rather, without those previous distractions, all of these pieces fit into a more cohesive picture, and the melodies ring out that much clearer.
Watching the rollout of reactions to The Missing has offered an intriguing look at the expectations placed upon artists because of their past. To wit, Metal Sucks dismissed The Missing outright for its seeming omission of heaviness, decrying its “fake smoke and eyeliner, lacking any of the blood and sweat and grit that infuses raw life into metal.” But at Echoes and Dust, a reviewer commended the hints of the National and U2 nestled into its heaviness. Writing for Decibel, Adrien Begrand lauded its ambitious mix of post-punk and black metal and Strawn’s “high-gloss 1986-87” gothic tendencies. He called it a “challenging listen,” though, but here I am mentioning Armistead Burwell Smith IV, the Gin Blossoms, and Mogwai. The Missing, then, seems like a meticulous collage, where the parts that mean the most to you are the parts you’ll find the fastest. Maybe there won’t be enough metal or enough solos or enough eyeliner, or maybe there will be too much of all of it. I sometimes wish it dipped down into mid-tempo trods a bit less. Still, on The Missing, Vaura’s stylistic composite is decisive and deliberate, putting those pedigrees to use in a surprising and somehow entirely sensible fashion.
