Review of Vehemence - God Was Created

Vehemence is a new band recently signed by Metal Blade's Brian Slagel. He seems to have made a winning choice with this band too. Vehemence is a very unique band. They combine beautiful melodic passages with just shear utter brutality. If you're thinking ok, this might kind of sound like Opeth, you're dead wrong. There are moments where you get some great clean guitar work similar to Opeth, but the brutal vokills never let down. Plus some of these riffs are just plain heavy. This seems to me to be like a band that should quickly grab notice of the metal community having elements mainly of death and doom metal. This album contains some cool guitar work. Guitarists Bjorn and John combine great riffs that will go from a My Dying Bride sound to a Suffocation sound. They also blend some great clean work in there, but not as much in the later part of the album. It would have been nice if the clean stuff were found a little bit more often. I'm not saying it needs to be every song, but maybe about half of them, because the melodic stuff these guys write is really cool. Andy does a great job behind the kit. He's got some great double kick parts in this album, and the rest of the beats are very solid. Mark the bassist seems to handle the backing vokills with the high pitch stuff, which accents lead singer, Nathan's vokills quite well. In saying that, it brings me to my first complaint with the album. Nathan has one hell of a brutal voice, I'll give him that, but there are parts when he has to be using a vokill enhancer to reach the depths that he does. There are parts in this album where his voice just gets insanely low. This is one thing I don't like about some death metal bands. I don't like a lot of vokill enhancement, if any at all. I think if you can do it in the studio, you should be able to do it live no problem. I could be wrong about him using vokill enhancement, but until I hear otherwise I stand by my complaint. That brings me to the lyrics. The album is a concept album and basically follows the title of the album, God Was Created. It follows a guy who finds this girl he becomes obsessed with and kills her and her father (who's sexually abusing her) and then he has sex with her while she's dead (gross). It then proceeds to follow his embark into insanity where he ends up going on a killing spree in his school and later killing himself. All the while thoughts go through his head about Jesus and the fact that he believes God doesn't exist. The lyrics are very inventive and I like the concept of it all, it definitely gets a six in my book. Onto the production, that's factor number two that hurt the overall score. It's a bit raw. I'm not saying it's like Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas here, but it's not exactly Dimmu Borgir's Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia either. I believe this band could really be a power to behold with some better production. You can't really blame them for this factor though. This is their first album released on a major metal label, and I'm sure Metal Blade didn't give them a big studio budget like they would with say Cannibal Corpse. Either way I believe Vehemence will earn some respect with this album. This is one hell of a brutal album, so don't pass the opportunity up to check these guys out and be sure to keep an eye on them in the near future. They have the potential to be something much bigger.

Release Details

Vehemence

God Was Created

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