Dave Lombardo has spent four decades behind drum kits fast enough to strip paint — Reign in Blood, Dead Cross, Fantômas, session work alongside Mike Patton and John Zorn. None of that prepared anyone at Ipecac Recordings for the email he sent a couple of years ago: my wife has some music, would you take a listen.
The label's instinct, by its own account, was to brace for a favour. Paula Lombardo was not a name on anyone's radar. She had sung backing vocals for Wayne Newton in Las Vegas, tried and failed to get anywhere in Nashville, and largely walked away from music for the better part of a decade before her husband, during the pandemic, talked her back into it.
Venamoris is what came out of that return: a husband-and-wife project, Dave on drums and production, Paula on piano and vocals, that sounds almost nothing like anything else either of them has made. Their 2023 debut, Drown in Emotion, was recorded in their home studio. To Cross or to Burn, its follow-up on Ipecac, is where the project stops sounding like a side door out of thrash metal and starts sounding like its own address.
Nine tracks, thirty-three minutes, built around dark jazz chords, exotica textures and industrial low end, with Paula's voice doing the work a lead guitar might do elsewhere — patient, throaty, unhurried even when the lyrics are not. The record's title poses conformity against principle. "Pain is a gift, if we allow it to be," Paula has said of the songs, which is a franker way of describing an album about isolation than most artists manage.
The guest list reads like a phone book of Dave's old life: Alex Skolnick from Testament, Gary Holt from Exodus, Suicidal Tendencies' Ra Diaz, and Trevor Dunn, his bandmate in Fantômas and Mr Bungle.
Holt turns up on a cover of the Scorpions' "Animal Magnetism," a Rudolf Schenker composition that could easily have been a novelty and instead becomes the record's most purely enjoyable four minutes.
What makes Venamoris work is the refusal to let Dave's reputation drive the record. He plays for the songs rather than for the room, and Paula is never made to compete with the metal names circling her. That restraint is rare in a genre built on excess, and it is the reason a project that could easily have been a curiosity instead sounds like a real second act, built by two people who nearly didn't make it back to a stage together at all.
