I’m amazed this band has garnered some hype. VioLution is the third of a trilogy wherein V:28 delineate the end of the human race and the ‘deconstruction of planet Earth,’ i.e., Armageddon. Wow, war and the end of the world! I’m not an originality Nazi, but those are base metal topics. That’s like a goregrind band singing about putrefaction and stealing clips from slasher films they just bought through Something Weird, Just For the Hell of It and/or other gray-market video companies. The unique selling point here is that V:28 wraps its topics in an ‘industrial death metal’ package, which isn’t new but also hasn’t been done to death lately.

V:28’s claim of being industrial death metal actually sounds promising. Throbbing Gristle and Autopsy mashed together should sound like the Reese’s Pieces of…wait, this is just modern metal with synths. Fuck. The keyboards are decently atmospheric, but everything else on VioLution comes across as generic and V:28 aren’t really that heavy. This isn’t proper electronic/metal fusion as V:28 don’t mash electronic noise with abrasive guitars like Schizoid, Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Gigantic Brain do, nor do they go the Soul of a New Machine-era Fear Factory/Strapping Young Lad route of trying to shove death metal into a rigid rhythmic framework. Without the keyboards, the odd industrial-oriented guest artist and the cover imagery, VioLution just seems like midpaced deathblack extreme metal horseshittery.

The music video for "Shut It Down" included with the disc is surprisingly well-done, aside from the obviously low-budget computer animation and doofy shots of the band posing in camo pants. The video itself isn’t that good - Mr. Shaky shoots clips of V:28 in standard metalhead poses, soldiers in gas masks, public-domain images of war, lots of open mouth shots, it’s all very middle-of-the-road stuff - but it’s at least professional. Shit, MuchMusic’s Loud frequently aired that Meshuggah video where all the camera did was spin around in a circle. No music video could look shittier than that. Seeing someone’s mouth six hundred times fails to come across as ‘evil’ to me, but the video was above the usual enhanced-CD camcorder footage of a band performing in a small club/high school auditorium/garage, so credits to V:28 for that.

I don’t care about V:28 enough that I can recommend VioLution in any way, since I was looking for something a lot harsher than this. I think the end of the world is going to sound like people screaming in interminable pain as they burn into carbon, women being raped by gangbangers and meteors impacting major metropolitan areas. All sounds will be at levels that’ll destroy eardrums and cause people to lose equilibrium, leading to the falling off of skyscrapers and staircases. V:28 just can’t compete with that kind of brutality.

Written By: The Ultimate Mark