Vehemence: The Cathartic Remnants of Chaos, Virtue and Time

There’s very little good to come out of this (thankfully) unknown album. It really stinks, quite a lot.

The guitars are a mish-mash of riffs that don’t really come out and do much. Pick a song and I guarantee you will not recall any riff from it. There is a lot of chugging and shredding going on, but it is all a blur…only in the parts when they slow down slightly can you distinguish what sort of riff they’re playing, and even then, they are not that memorable.

The drumming is not much better. The snare drum has a strange snappy sound to it, which is twice as loud as any other drum. The bass drums are almost lost in the low-end. The toms, when they’re used, don’t sound too bad, so at least they’re used effectively and don’t sound off. He is a good drummer, but at the speeds Bane play, he needs to tighten the screws a little more, especially when he’s blasting. I think the songs are too quick for him when he tries to blast, because, just like the guitars, they are not very accurate and it very much sounds like they are forced…like he is struggling to keep the pace.

The vocals are bad. The words are completely indistinguishable, especially those awful high screeches. They sound terrible, and Bane would’ve been much better keeping the low ones and ditching the other style. It’s a pity the vocals are so poor, because the track “Departed” has some interesting lyrics to them, and would’ve benefited greatly from more legible speaking. Although, as it stands, they could be singing about fairies and sunshine, and you would not know the difference.

None of the songs have any personality at all. They’re all a sloppy assortment of uncoordinated riffs, disjointed drumming, bass that is lost in the melee, and vocals that are not worthy of any credit. I am convinced they can’t play their instruments fast, and the vocalist can’t growl properly. They should’ve stuck to playing something slower, and it shows through the guitar instrumentals. When they slow it down, and concentrate more on the riffs, they’re not that bad. However, the rest of the tracks are close enough to garbage to warrant this album as a failure.

Some fans of brutal death might enjoy this kind of thing, because at least it is brutal (minus the guitar instrumentals), and I like brutal death, but this is sub-standard at best. Maybe this album is not well known for a good reason – because it’s bad.

Bane have certainly made an unusual album to say the very least. Dissonant riffs contrasted in the next few moments by slam-esque grooves, then a full on grind assault all within the first two minutes or so of this album. This is perhaps the forecast of the whole album, in a way.

The above-mentioned dissonant riffs carry an unusual little cadence to them, as though they tried to maintain a melodic sensibility about them (Have a look at "Putrescent Oblation" to see what I'm talking about), and to an extent they succeed at this. The thing I like a lot about this one is that the drummer feels absolutely no need to show you how quick he can play, unlike a lot of brutal death metal bands, and actually plays something other than uncreative blast beats that over-ride everything else on the track. The vocals sound like most brutal death/goregrind vocals. They sound a tad static, however, as though heard through an improperly tuned radio, but in a way that fits with everything else. The guitars also seem to have a similarly fuzzy production on the slower parts, with the pinch harmonics accentuated quite well by it and the riffs played lending to a heavier atmosphere.

The most standout tracks, to me, would be "Birth of Oblivion" and the closing track "The Descanting Chant of Creation". The former for the simple fact that it's just a clean instrumental in comparison with this dissonant grind trip they're on most of the time. It's really beautiful in an enigmatic sort of way. The latter for it being a slow ambient piece, enigmatic and dark like the other instrumental. For the band's death metal tracks, I would nominate the first two as the best, mainly because of how they show the most of what Bane does, and the riffs simply appeal to me best. This album is unlike a lot of today's hackneyed brutal death metal for it's attention to atmosphere and conception of tonal experimentation, and I appreciate that.