EP REVIEW: Gods Who Decree – Graven Image

There does seem to be a bit of a tendency here in the UK for people to fawn all over US hardcore bands while paying less attention to homegrown talent. Maybe it’s just because those bands don’t come over as often, but we really must be careful not to overlook all that the likes of BUN DEM OUT, RENOUNCED and TRC have done for UKHC over the years, or indeed this debut effort from GRAVEN IMAGE which brings together members of all those bands and more for a vicious little metallic hardcore throwback.

Gods Who Decree draws obvious enough influence from a few places, but most of all it lines up pretty nicely with the 90s metalcore of the likes of ARKANGEL and UNDYING and PRAYER FOR CLEANSING – you know, right around the time all those bands started borrowing from Slaughter Of The Soul and Scandinavian black metal, but before they brought in the clean choruses that would soon become another of the genre’s defining features. It’s a sound that plenty of others are doing really well at the moment, but perhaps as you might expect given the experience of all involved, it still holds up with freshness and urgency in GRAVEN IMAGE’s hands.

It does make it hard to say much about this that many readers won’t have already deciphered though. Melodeathy riffs and blackened tremolo parts and big chugging breakdowns are all where you’d expect to find them, with guitarist Charlie Wilson granting the band a mix that’s just raw enough to feel old school but not so raw as to feel miles off the standards of today. Vocalist Andy Baz Haynes has a great raspy howl in particular and his lyrics deal in themes of “personal struggle, corruption and religion” – so, you know, the usual stuff really – and the EP runs pretty blisteringly from start to finish in a taut 16-and-a-half minutes with no huge surprises save perhaps from the bordering-on-deathcore guttural ugliness found in the beatdown of third track Reckoner.

The title track which follows that is something of a bracing highlight even if it remains largely in keeping with the prevailing vibe and quality of all that surrounds it; there’s just a hard to place heightened savagery about it as it runs through blast beats and tremolo picking and big chugging riffs before a massive final breakdown lays it to rest that makes it an easy shout for your old school metalcore playlist if you had to narrow it down to one. But then again it’s all great really, with closer The War In My Name rounding things out with a sample of the iconic “I believe in death…” monologue from William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III that feels well-suited to the sense of darkness that often hangs over GRAVEN IMAGE’s particular brand of metalcore.

So while it may not completely rearrange the face of the genre, Gods Who Decree does at least leave it with another nasty scar; this is old school metalcore the way it should always be done, as indeed many others have proven in recent years. You probably know if this is your thing or not already, but if somehow this is the first one of these records to convince you then you’re in for a real treat checking out some of the bands mentioned above, and indeed all those carrying the torch for something similar today.

Rating: 8/10

Gods Who Decree is set for release on November 4th via The Coming Strife/Death Farm Records.

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