Review Summary: Castrating sex offenders with a promising hardcore-tinged Death Metal debut? Venom Prison have a point to prove.
Venom Prison is another one of those rising star bands that everyone seems to be very excited about in metal at the moment. The female fronted 5 piece from the UK, with their chaotic, dissonant and violent brand of hardcore-tinged death metal have just finished obliterating the UK and Europe alongside Trivium, Code Orange and Power Trip, and with future tours alongside Aborted, Psycroptic, Dying Fetus and Goatwhore on the horizon, the band look to be here to stay. Anyone who has seen them live can attest to their awesome stage presence for such a young group, able to fill the stage of seemingly any venue presented to them, and rarely, if ever, dropping the ball. The question is, is their first full-length album
Animus any good, or do the band fall short of the hype?
Possibly the first thing to address is that if you came to
Animus expecting an experimental, groundbreaking death metal album, you might leave sorely disappointed. The band certainly isn't attempting to reinvent the wheel here, rather gently bend the rules of the genre, incorporating a little atmosphere here, a little bit of a hardcore groove there, saving the album from being anonymous without really marking itself out as especially innovative. This isn't to say that Venom Prison are generic; their sound is very much a distinct one, with Larissa Stupar's distinctive howl ripping through the tension built by the atmospheric opener, 'Syllogism', to kick the blast-beat heavy 'Abysmal Agony' off to a riotous start. The track drops back into a satisfying groove not dissimilar to the slower mid-section on Cattle Decapitation's 'Clandestine Ways (Krokodil Rot)', before firing back into a flurry of atonal shredding, closing with a satisfying, breakdown-adjacent chugging section. This distinctly discordant, fast and frantic style is one quite common across the album, with 'The Exquisite Taste of Selfishness', 'Celestial Patricide' and 'Devoid' all opting for a similar tone. Each adds elements of variety, the latter's lead guitar licks in the mid-section of the song breaking from absolute discordance for some satisfyingly melodic soloing. Whilst not particularly memorable, the band carries off this atonal approach to riffing quite well, the variance in pace and dynamics keeping songs interesting for the duration, no one melodic idea outstaying its welcome before another, equally crushing motif comes to take its place.
Song structure is one of Venom Prison's real strengths across the record, with probably the best track coming in the shape of 'Desecration of Human Privilege', opening with a satisfying tapped lead section, the song's relentless brutality closed out by a stomping groove that wouldn't feel out of place on Mastodon's
Blood Mountain. Another point to note about this album is the mark that the band's Hardcore influence leaves on the sound of the album. There are, to some people's inevitable disgust, some dreaded 'breakdowns' that might turn purists off the band's otherwise fairly orthodox sound. For those with less of a phobia towards heavy chugging sections, many of the record's most enjoyable tracks utilise breakdowns really quite effectively. The aforementioned 'Desecration...', as well as 'Womb Forced Animus' and 'Perpetrator Emasculation' drop huge changes of pace that avoid sounding too derivative, whilst keeping the momentum going, and possibly even eliciting the odd headbang from the listener.
'Immanentize Eschaton' has to be noted as an absolute standout track, as it lands halfway through the album and demonstrates Venom Prison's ability to be stunningly musically diverse within the Death Metal template. Whilst hints of black metal influence pop up across the album, on 'Corrode the Black Sun' and 'Womb Forced Animus', 'Immanetize's chugging, sluggish opening gives way to an expansive, distinctly Nordic chorus-section that fully explores Black Metal's atmospheric tone. Diminished chords suspended over Larissa's haunting screams provide a truly haunting pause to the out-and-out brutality found across the rest of the album, and leaves possibly the biggest impression of any track on the record.
Lyrically, the album is something of a political statement, rallying against the misogyny that the band see as implicit within the Death Metal subgenre. Turning stereotypes on their heads, 'Perpetrator Emasculation' leads with the call of 'Rapist, ***ing die', going on to describe the castration of a sex offender, blending the genre's brutal and gory subject matter with a politically charged rally against the depiction of women in extreme metal genres. Similar themes can be found across the track-listing, but even if you're averse to the semi-feminist lyrical direction the band takes, there's still a lot to enjoy here. Whilst not groundbreaking, Venom Prison serve up a potent, technically proficient and crushingly brutal slab of death metal on
Animus, not unique enough to be deemed an excellent record in its own right, but showing sufficient potential and polish to be seen as a great debut, and a band to keep an eye on in the future.
