Review: Culak – Underneath the Veil, Veil of God, and Underneath the Veil of God (or alternatively {(Underneath the [Veil) of God]}): A triple album review

Style: djent, ambient, choral music (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Vildhjarta
Review by: Andy
Country: Texas, United States
Release date: 29 February, 2024

Dear Mr. Christian Culak, my pal Zach’s arch nemesis,

You have some serious balls and an admirable sense of self-awareness to send us a promo after Zach’s last couple reviews of your work. I loved how you made him suffer, but over the sound of my guffaws when you sent us a triple album for him to be subjected to forcefully, I heard a small whisper from Sam to Zach that Zach had earned a break and it was my turn to be tortured: I get the honor to review somebody as noble art thou this time. You might be hopeful that I’m nicer than Zach, but handing me a triple album of djent is certainly a foreboding first impression. 

Godspeed Chris,

Andy

P. S. I hope you don’t mind if I review all three once in one fell swoop.

Underneath the Veil opens promisingly enough with a nondescript piano solo, but painfully quickly Mr. Culak punishes you with unbearable djent. While the over-quantized, hyper-clean sound of modern stalwarts of the genre sounds pitifully inhuman and played-out, I wish that Underneath the Veil had squeaky clean production. I don’t know whether to start with the detachedness or the overall quality of damp swamp-ass, so I’ll discuss the Extermination Dismemberment-esque bass slams (see 2:46 in “Ayn” for the first example of many). Everything in the sound is shoved aside for a huge swell of bass, but he implements and produces it with all the finesse of boogie-boarding a tsunami. Prog metal never jumped onto the bass boosted trends as far as I’m aware, and I’m relieved after hearing the lowest quality attempt. Back to the detachedness: Underneath the Veil sounds like the instruments were tracked in separate rooms while the recorder was also in the building next door, turning the entire project into a hollow mess. If minutiae in the riffing were there (trust me, it’s not), this would be a shameful production job, but it’s par for the course for Culak. Everything that you can hear is drowned out in enough reverb to sound and smell like Zach’s ass after a long summer’s day peddling meth and wrangling gators in Florida—thank god we can’t do scratch-and-sniff fonts yet.

So what exactly is going on beneath the tortured production and reverb-pedal? Well, a whole lot of not much. Like The Dark Atom, Underneath the Veil flows a bit like ambient, but the riffs Culak wrote are worse than Dennis Martensson’s… and those are *procedurally djenerated*. Culak writes worse riffs than a primitive algorithm could cook up for ten hours straight. Underneath the Veil is unadorned with anything except the most mindless of chugging and several ambient tracks which are mind-numbingly dull filler, although still better than the djent. On its own, Underneath the Veil would rank among the worst djent albums I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing (if I had to say something positive, I think his piano arrangements every couple tracks are rather lovely), but it’s paired with eighty more minutes of the stuff. Shall we keep going?

Oh Veil of God, a single word away from the title of my favorite album of all time. If Culak knew me personally, I’d be sure it was a cruel joke, but it’s only the universe laughing at me. Veil of God is immediately much better than its predecessor, though, simple choral music that is totally ok at its best! It’s not the most beautiful arrangement you’ve ever heard nor does Culak bother fixing the reverb problems—particularly noticeable when it’s human voices—but ok choral music is infinitely better than senseless djent. However, in classic Culak fashion, he pushes me far beyond my limitless capacity for patience, and this, too, grows incredibly tiring quickly, especially since tracks like “Evanesce” make it crystal clear that these are cheaply synthesized human voices and not actual choirs. I’m not mad or even surprised, I’m just disappointed. I’d love to continue bashing Culak for his stupid ass choices, but this disk really doesn’t leave a lot to write about; it’s slow, uneventful, poorly produced, dubiously paced with those stupid ambient interludes in an already ambient-adjacent choral album, bland, insipid, still-better-than-Underneath the Veil, not good…

If your brain works at the frightening pace of a mile per minute, you probably didn’t put together that Underneath the Veil of God is the two previous albums superimposed, and the choral djent works surprisingly passably at times—certainly more synergistically than either part on their own. But it leaves one with the age-old question: why on god’s green earth would you listen to this instead of Vildhjarta (never mind why would one listen to Vildhjarta)? While the choirs fill a bit of that space between the recording device and the instruments that Underneath the Veil left, the release still feels pitifully weak with neither the heaviest chugs hitting hard nor the ambient parts landing as particularly valuable resting periods. 

I respect Culak’s ambition and his obvious ability to take criticism on the nose, but releasing three albums where two are just constituents of the (already lackluster and strangely empty) third all at once, and calling it a triple album feels particularly silly. While the two albums stitched together makes Underneath the Veil of God tolerable, listening to either of the other disks separate—or all in one sitting twice as I did—is torture and simply stupid. There is no reason for Culak to believe his process or music is special enough to release two extra half albums and demand all three to be listened to. Perhaps he doesn’t intend for all three to be listened to, but since we received all three as a promo and they’re all up on his Bandcamp without explanation, I figure they are, and to that I must bash Culak for his overinflated ego. If you read this and even considered clicking the embed, you’re loooooong gone, craving djent enough to be scraping underneath the barrel for your fix. 

Wait, what’s that? Is somebody screaming??

Final verdict: Under the Veil – 2/10; Veil of God – 2/10; Underneath the Veil of God – 3/10; {(Underneath the [Veil) of God]} – 1/10

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Review by: Zach

Well, well, well. We meet again Mr. Culak. You really thought you could shake me off that easily, did you? You seem to misunderstand, your fate and mine are intertwined. With every album you send me, my average score grows lower, and once I start properly rating albums it’s over for all of you. Mr. Culak, with this heaping helping of a triple album, you have given me the greatest gift of them all: experience. Now all the limiters are off. I’ve given you two chances, and you just won’t listen. My apologies, my musical rival, but this is the end for you.

Underneath the Veil of God, and that’s what I’ll be referring to this shitshow as, is all of that Culak ambition coupled with the Culak style of songwriting. For those of you not insane enough to follow the last two installments of this trilogy, Culak has been “working” “hard” on releasing at least one album every year since 2013, and has now upped the ante to multiple a year. I stumbled face-first into this rabbit hole with Holy Tempest, Culak’s take on some prog/power/death/folk CLUSTERFUUUCK. While it was terrible, the least I can say was it’s a hell of a lot more creative than whatever the last two have been.

Somewhere along the line, Christian Culak discovered this band called Vildhjarta, henceforth abandoning all other elements in his music to make what we like to call “thall”. Bog-standard thall, mind you: the most creative we get on this whole musical massacre is the piano that starts ‘Ayn’. The first part of this horrible “triple album” contains not an ounce of notable riffs, moments, or anything to speak of. It’s the musical equivalent of taking an Ambien. Just as it bores me to tears, it also makes me ponder what Culak thought when he was releasing this mess.

See, Underneath the Veil of God isn’t a triple album in the traditional sense. Disc 1, Underneath the Veil, is all djentstrumental, Veil of God is just a midi choir, and Underneath the Veil of God has the novel idea of putting those two together. These are not musically connected in any way shape or form, and may as well be the same album thrice. To be quite honest with you, I think this is somehow worse than last year’s Dreamforge because of the lack of anything to latch onto. Throughout these three albums, there’s not a single song that even sounded remotely put together. Culak’s signature style of “no songwriting’ is put on full display here. Each section moves glacially through chugs, dissonant clean guitars, and weird pitch-shifter sounds. Not to mention three-minute tracks that are just ambient whooshing. 

So, let’s have a chat here, Christian. I get that you think my reviews are hilarious, and you flatter me. But this may be the single most derivative piece of music I’ve ever listened to for this blog. I love Vildhjarta too, and I’ve seen their influence displayed in non-Buster Odenholm projects (see The Ritual Aura and the new Firelink single). This “triple album” isn’t influenced, it’s blatant stealing. For a guy who releases so many albums every year, you really want your mark to be “the guy who copied Vildhjarta without any of the songwriting prowess of Vildhjarta”. You have given up on writing riffs, and instead, you replace them with computerized chugs. Your riffs weren’t good, but you never gave yourself the chance to edit. You push out slop like some kind of musical sausage factory, and knowing damn well you read these, you have neglected my advice of “slow the fuck down and learn to write”.

You had folk and power metal influence on Holy Tempest, and you abandoned all of that for something that was even worse. Where did those other influences go? Were they washed aside for this newfound thall obsession? Sure, the choir is a nice choice, but you don’t do anything with it. It’s just these computerized voices atop the same sluggish “riffs” that haunt disc one. There’s no spice, and the album feels lifeless as a result.

Christian, I’d love to say it would be nice to catch up next year, but I really hope we don’t. I admire your ambition, and the swiftness with which you release albums, but how many times do I need to say it: learn your fucking craft. Stop pumping out musical slop every year. There is truly nothing about this album that I can say that Andy already hasn’t, so I’ll leave you with this: Go on your anime training arc, come back stronger than ever, and fix this mess of a final score.

Final Verdict: 1/10

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Recommended tracks: Vildhjarta
You may also like: No One Knows What the Dead Think, Discordance Axis

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Metal-Archives page

Label: independent

Culak is:
– Christian Culak (everything)