Vital Remains - Icons Of Evil
Vital Remains are a band with a long history, releasing their first demo with the last days of the 1980s, and maintaining a fairly steady musical output ever since. And, from the sounds of their newest offering 'Icons of Evil', the band's musical content is just as predictable and, well, old fashioned for want of a better word, something their press release at least makes no bones about, proudly proclaiming their eighties influences - the big names of early extreme metal, such as Venom and Destruction - as well as declaring their dislike for the "ugly" trends of modern metal. Well, if it ain't broke and all that...
'Icons of Evil' is hardly a groundbreaking album, or even a particularly original one, doing what Vital Remains and others have been doing for twenty odd years. However, it does the whole generic blackened death metal thing rather well, and you can hardly accuse the album, with it's granny-traumatising artwork and the proclamation that "there is not enough holy water availible to wash away [it's]...unholiness!!!". Yes, with no less than three exclamation marks. That's some brutally uncompromising punctuation right there.
The music does live up to the posturing of it's publicity materials, with vocals you could strip paint with and guitars swerving between melodic widdling and wall-of-noise brutality. It's all very good for annoying your neighbours, and many bands have proved that the guitars/vocals/drums style of extreme metal can work excellently. Still...could someone introduce these guys to the notion of the keyboard, please? While the music is largely pedestrian, and sometimes rather good, it sounds a little empty from time to time, chugging along within a fairly limited sonic range.
The album doesn't really have any particular standout tracks, as such, but it's also far from bad. It's more that, after a hefty 67 minutes or so, one brutal blast of sonic blasphemy really starts to sound an awful lot like the last three did. Certain moments, such as the chorus of 'Scorned', with it's memorable guitar riff, do leap out at the listener, but aside from these it's all a little bland. Well written background music for an elevator ride to Hell, if you will.
Things do get rather more fun towards the end, though, with 'Disciples of Hell' - an Yngwie Malmsteen cover that is most successful in, ahem, "unleashing the fucking fury". It's also got a nice combo of melody and brutality going on, with a driving guitar line overlayed with classic acid-gargling vocals.
While this album isn't going to set the world on fire (although if you believe the press release it might ignite a few churches with it's sheer malevolence), it's competant enough, and certainly a worthwhile purchase if you're one of those people whose music collection is full of bands with names like "Blasphemise" (note: as far as this reviewer is aware, Blasphemise are not a real band. But if they are I would dearly like to hear them) and very little in the way of clean vocals. With their recent tour and a DVD due out in the very near future, plenty of people seem to enjoy what Vital Remains do, and by the sounds of this latest offering, clearly they have good reason to.