Vein - Errorzone

I had seen a small wave of hype around Vein these past few weeks, but what really turned my head toward them was the endorsement of Code Orange by bringing them on their most recent tour. Granted, they’re also bringing Twitching Tongues, but my curiosity was sparked nonetheless.

Released just this past weekend, Errorzone is the band’s full-length debut and one that states its objective clearly and executes with full force.

The opening track, “Virus://Vibrance”, kicks the album off with these very Dillinger Escape Plan-esque mathcore guitar chords and similarly chaotic, eviscerating vocal delivery. The track encapsulates very well how much from the world of metal the band throw into this album. Industrial samples, fast and thunderous metallic hardcore beats, even downtuned guitar accents that take me straight back to nu metal’s more violent and less marketable contributors. The steadily bass-supported “Old Data in a Dead Machine” that follows immediately after with not a second of breath to prepare reinforces the industrially violent nu metal aura of the record with low, rumbling guitar riffs rising up out of the fast-paced mathcore tempest, even introducing some despondent clean vocals that show up throughout the album that provide a menacing sense of nihilism to contrast the album’s tortured screaming.

The minute-long “Rebirth Protocol” feels kind of undercooked and more like an incomplete section of a skeleton of a song than a segue, not even providing a potentially beneficial change in dynamic on the album in some way. But the song that follows immediately after brings plenty of unhinged energy and varying musical ideas to quickly reinvigorate the album; “Broken Glass Complexion” jams a number of battering hardcore riffs into an entropic storm of nails filled with plenty of guitar accents and rhythm changes.

The track “Anesthesia” serves mostly as an industrial change of pace and an intro to the following song, “Demise Automation”, which is similarly short but packs a ton of untamed industrial metal and metalcore aggression into is compact length. Following it ironically enough is the album’s longest song, “Doomtech”, which slows down and provides a much-needed focus on groove, with plenty of violent hardcore abrasion across its more palpably structured span.

The third minute-long track “Untitled” centers around a raucous guitar riff and fast drum beats that synch with it, but the last part of the song features an eerie guitar-harmonized outro that sets it apart from the rest of the album. The “End Eternal” that follows immediately after doesn’t really offer much new at its position on the album, but it’s a tough, savage cut that showcases what the band have done so far and that they can do it again.

The title track leans heavily on modern hardcore rhythms and harmonics, but it actually brings a less pessimistic outlook with the melody of its cleanly sung midsection, which is of course eviscerated by the closing track’s berserk defeatist self-destruction.

One thing I will say about this album is that its nonstop barrage of sound presents potential trouble for its flow given how wildly it injects new musical motifs at every turn. Consequently it can kind of blend everything together into a bit of a mush of similarly paced rapid riffing and ferociously feral shouting that’s hard to pick out the parts of on the initial listen.

With thorough dissection though, even with so many of the ingredients being similar and though the album doesn’t go to far-off genres for novelty, its arrangement of furious metalcore and industrially tinged powerviolence makes for one of the year’s most relentless albums, and a remarkable debut for the band. I imagine they won’t waste time following up with a sophomore LP, but I do hope that they can manage to hone the compositional aspects of their sound the way Code Orange have without sacrificing its destructiveness. As impressively pummeling and youthfully energetic as this album is, a certain level of its open rawness comes at the expense of some songwriting, a facet of their sound I would love to hear Vein hone in the future.