Review Summary: A blissful 7 minutes of pure and unrefined old-school hardcore.
Sometimes, the basics are where it's at, and no one knows this better than hardcore bands. Instead of making hour-plus albums of instrumental indulgence and abstract song structures, they make 20-minute full-lengths of short, to-the-point slices of frenetic intensity. A lot of the hardcore out there is near as stripped-down as you can get, but Veins has flipped this notion on its head and made Infest's last look like a Dream Theater album.
Basically, what you see here is what you get. This obscure little demo has seven tracks that have a total duration of seven minutes, with the longest here being barely over two minutes. Veins are not going to give you any bullcrap. Each and every second of those seven minutes are spent bashing you over the head with old-school hardcore punk: the band never relents. The vocals are punky, monotonous yells that are more reminiscent of Infest or Discharge than they are of modern, heavier hardcore acts such as Defeater or Kerouac. The guitars, bass, and drums have that garage band feel, but are never so abrasive as to detract from the album. The riffs are just as stripped-down as everything else on here: they are fast, mean, short, and fierce. The bass is barely audible, and the drums are just as chaotic as everything else here.
Overall,
Veins doesn't take much to get into. It's short and catchy, and as such it never grows tedious. It's about as good as a seven-minute hardcore demo can get, and is a must-have for anyone who likes the genre and has too short of an attention span to sit through an
entire half-hour Defeater album. Veins get major kudos for how deprived of any and all needless bullcrap their debut is, and this proves that, if not anything else, they are certainly a band to look out for in the future.
