ALBUM REVIEW: Break.Burn.End – Violent Life Violent Death

File this one wherever you keep things that are not surprising. North Carolina’s VIOLENT LIFE VIOLENT DEATH have released a steady stream of EPs since their formation back in 2016, each of them probably most simply described as savage and fantastic, and now as the metallic hardcore five-piece graduate to a debut full-length it is satisfying if perhaps entirely expected to report that the same holds true of Break.Burn.End. As the relatively limited press notes so eloquently put it: “Sometimes violence is the answer.”

Even with the progression to a longer format, Break.Burn.End doesn’t ask loads of its listener, with a 24-and-a-half-minute runtime that’s only a couple more than the band’s 2018 EP Come Heavy Breath, for example. The difference here however is that VIOLENT LIFE VIOLENT DEATH have managed to squeeze a full ten tracks into that time, the experience one of heightened levels of intensity, urgency and momentum even when the band were hardly struggling for that sort of thing in the first place.

As metallic hardcore goes, they’ve got a lot locked down; groove, thrash, big chugging breakdowns, perhaps all roughly where you’d expect to find them, but still delivered with invariable precision and arranged in a way that ensures the album never stays in one lane for too long. Most of the tracks throw a fair whack at you, to the point that there isn’t much to be gained from digging into one of them over any other, but through them all runs a particularly bleak atmosphere that’s established right from the outset as Weapon Of Pain opens the record with a desperate and hate-filled prayer.

This sense of despair is carried most of all throughout the album by vocalist Scott Cowan, who remains without question one of the band’s sharpest and most memorable weapons. Aside perhaps from an uncanny resemblance to that of Dan Weyandt of ZAO, Cowan’s twisted, vicious snarl doesn’t really sound like many other vocalists in the current metallic hardcore scene and this in turn helps VIOLENT LIFE VIOLENT DEATH carve out more of their own identity where many other bands may be a little more easily mistaken for one another. To put it quite simply, they just sound a bit more evil than a lot of their contemporaries, especially with the sporadic additions of gloomier chants and whispers over the course of the record.

Before anyone gets wildly ahead of themselves, none of this is to suggest that what VIOLENT LIFE VIOLENT DEATH are doing here is completely without precedent; they’ve borrowed plenty from the 90s as is generally always a good move and they do still slot in nicely enough among a lot of what’s happening in the scene today, it’s just that they’ve also got a bit of an edge – a sense of darkness that lingers even after the album has ended – that should be all they need to hold their own even in such a crowded field. 

Rating: 8/10

Break.Burn.End is set for release on September 15th via Innerstrength Records.

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