Venomous Concept • Poisoned Apple
Thrash metal super group Venomous Concept features members of Napalm Death, Brutal Truth, The Melvins and Fantomas. They were originally signed to Mike Patton’s Ipecac label and now with new label Century Media behind them Venomous Concept are ready to blow your mind yet again with their second release and follow up to 2004’s ‘Retroactive Abortion’.
This one’s called ‘Poisoned Apple’ and as you can expect it’s one seriously intense bend of hardcore punk, grind and ferocious violent energy.
Their extreme fast and furious style is a given, but these guys have an advantage, their experience and ability clearly sets them apart from the rest. They combine all the old school energy, raw power and pure aggression. It takes you back to the early days of hardcore, when bands used to play with so much frustration and wound up energy.
The result of this anger is ‘Poisoned Apple’. Half an hour of uncomplicated hardcore energy, with no frills, no self-indulgent guitar twiddling and no obvious technical know how. This is not to say these guys are incapable of doing so, I sincerely think they can, but they’ve chosen to keep it raw and completely dirty.
The thrash influence is obvious as are the death metal growls. There’s also a bit of a groove on some tracks, but mainly this is overpowered by absolute organised chaos. All credit to the drumming, it’s solid and it pummels at a pace that sounds humanly impossible!
When you can hear them above the thick grinding bass and 100 mile and hour pummelling drums, the vocals are particularly nasty. They snarl and they really do spit venom.
‘Poisoned apple’ sounds like an album at double speed and it doesn’t go easy on the ears at all, in fact it’s so full of pure hatred it makes it perfect for those moments when you want to slam your fist into a wall and scream at the top of your voice. Venomous Concept is like a stress reliever; it will calm you down and piss everyone else off!
This is absolute hardcore metal euphoria. Those that love the feeling of their ear drums been torn ragged will drool over this. Those that don’t better stay clear. I think Venomous Concept wanted to let their hair down with this one, play as loud as they want, as fast as they want and as nasty without giving a thought in hell about who’s going to listen. I bet quite a few are intrigued though, with a band line up like this who won’t be?