Dense, bleak and more soul-destroying than the Ryanair customer services department, Dutch three-piece VILLAINY have created an ambitious follow-up to their first album. Hoovering up elements of Doom, Crust-Punk and Black Metal, "Villainy II: Dim" is a difficult and occasionally tedious listen, consisting of ten tracks of reverberating avant-garde extremity. The songs lack any kind of hooks, go on for extended periods of time and the vocals only make sporadic appearances. It's atmospheric sure, but it's also dull and maintaining any interest in it past the first few tracks is a major challenge.

The first problem is a distinct lack of variation in the material. Sticking to a particular template isn't always a drawback (SLAYER have been relying on it for decades) but the repetition of one idea gets old very quickly. They have a tendency to pick one melancholic chord progression and play it over and over again, to the extent that by track four it starts to feel like you've been forced to hang out with a corpse-painted version of Sadness from the Inside Out movie all day. There are brief glimpses of life to be found like the jaunty, gypsy Doom of "A Familiar Wind" or the unexpected guitar solo in "Herschapen," but they are few and far between. The rest is just ominous droning with nothing but screeching rants and the odd change in tempo providing any respite.

In fairness to VILLAINY though, what they've created is very far removed from mass-market consumption and they can cast a forbidding sense of dread with barely any effort. Unfortunately that's the only emotion they can do and unless you're looking for something appropriate to play while carrying a loved one's plague-ridden cadaver to the village burial ground, you're going to be left wanting.

This is all the more frustrating because vocals aside, the three guys who make up VILLAINY clearly have some serious skill at their chosen instruments. The drumming is especially good, moving from rapid-fire pummeling in the fast bits to a funereal pace at the drop of a hat, while the aforementioned guitar solo proves that frontman Reinier Vrancken has fire in his fingers. Their attempts at building vast sonic landscapes of power and torment just wind up being pretentious and boring however, so while "Villainy II" has flashes of inspiration, it's sadly a failure. A noble failure yes, but that doesn't make it any more interesting.

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