God Was Created

I can’t even describe how fucking sick I am of writing epic reviews for bands that suck this hard. However, I doubt I'll be able to confine this to morsel quantity. Ahem.
Vehemence are an Arizona-based Death metal act who, not surprisingly, became signed by Metal Blade shortly after their final decent piece of music went out of print. Their “demo”, as they for whatever reason like to call it, was a stainless razor ‘cross the jugular, and even after a solid week’s worth of listens, did not fail to impress me start to finish. The next album of theirs I heard was their third full length, “Helping The World To See”, which even in front of my eager ears, turned out to be one of the most boring swigs of metalcore-influenced bullshit I’d heard up to that point. Strangely enough, it wasn’t until recently I got to hear their sophomore effort all the way through... well, nearly. I actually ended up turning it off around track nine out of disgust. You might want to stop reading this now if you understand where it’s headed...

Apparently, in between the ‘raw masterpiece’ stage and the ‘Sounds-of-an-unkept-outhouse’ stage was a bombastic melody driven stage. Unfortunately, it’s no “Heartwork”. Simply put, Vehemence combine somewhat upbeat Swedish pseudo-thrash riffs with somewhat decent midwestern melodies with somewhat shit-awful drumming, equating to a somewhat mind numbingly bland experience. The keyboards are silly as hell, the bass, when coherent, does nothing special, and the vocals patterns are mechanical and rigid, weak in delivery, and fit in perfectly with the terrible music.

The only exception to be found is the album’s third track, Fantasy From Pain, which for some reason, sounds nothing like the remainder of the tracks, and is surprisingly, the only redeeming factor and more. I could actually say that I really like this song - it excludes all the weak-ass thrash riffs, and has an explosive beginning with a lot of spine. The midwestern flair makes the riffing sound angsty instead of gloomy or poppy, and the song’s atmosphere is akin to that of a more nihilistic City Of Caterpillar track; epic and tense.

To sum things up, avoid this album, and download Fantasy From Pain. Better yet, download the demo version found on that old 'Fire On The Brain' compilation. The production is just so much cleaner, and the song hits a lot harder. Vehemence have become terrible songwriters, so I'm glad to see they've finally split. It's easy to understand why bands like this "sell-out", if you'd like to call it that, but considering how excellent 'The Thoughts From Which I Hide' was, I expected better. Oh well, back to sleeping...