Venom - Storm the Gates



I haven’t been keeping track of Venom for a good while now, but I know they went through some sort of fracture or split of some sort that has now produced two incarnations of the band: Venom, with Cronos, and Venom Inc. with Tony Dolan and Jeff Dunn. When I saw that Venom had a new album slated for the end of the year, I figured I’d give it a shot, and I also figured that I may as well do my homework and check out what the other head of the proto-trash hydra had created last year. Venom Inc.’s album was undoubtedly flawed, but I was pleasantly surprised with the energy and the groove the supposed B-team brought to the table. The album needed some trimming and some more imaginative songwriting, but it at least made an attempt to modernize the long-prototypic sound the band had been playing with and showed some potential for future improvement (if things go rather ideally).
I hadn’t listened to a full Venom album past Possessed, getting only unconvincing snippets from their previous albums From the Very Depths and Fallen Angels, and this album reminded me why.
From the obnoxiously repetitive intro track, “Bring out Your Dead” to the dumb chest-puffing of the similarly overdrawn “Dark Night (of the Soul)”, what plagues this album most notably is Venom’s excessive reuse of musical ideas, not just from days past, but musical motifs within songs. Even with a little bit of retro thrash charm being the best feature of most of these tracks, the band’s overuse of the same riff in a single song and the lack of diversity of ideas obliterates any likability of these songs.
The album, does have a few moments of clarity; I particularly like the slower, more sinister black metal flavoring of the songs “I Dark Lord” and “Destroyer” because they sound much more fitting for Cronos’ gnarly voice than the brutish old-school thrash they kept trying way too much of on this album. I also like the blackened, thrashy trade-off of clean and distorted guitar on the bridge of “Over My Dead Body” (the rest of which is pretty silly and annoying). It’s these songs that make me wonder why they mostly continue to champion this obsolete form of thrash just because they started it.
For years, Venom has been the repeatedly propped up empty husk of the circumstantially fortunate originators of an old style that has evolved faster from its humble beginnings than the band ever were able to keep up with (or cared to keep up with) and farther than they seem to be able to ever feasibly reach, and Storm the Gates is only another reminder of that frustrating truth.

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