Impellitteri
Venom

A man named Chris is the guy behind the name that is the name of this band, a name that happens to be his last name. A band with a long history reaching all the way to the eighties and has several albums in the discography. The man named Chris is said to be an excellent guitarist with lightning fast fingers, the thing about lightning fingered guitarists though is that some of them (think Yngwie Malmsteen) are quite awful in regards to just playing boring stuff. But lets reserve judgement on Chris for a while longer and say that this new album is called Venom and it starts with the title track which can sometimes be a bold statement going for the signature melody from the start. Decent cover art on this album looking a bit neo-classical in style but what about the music, is it neo-classical?

Stylistically it is not that neo-classical it is more standard heavy metal with the typical power chords, guitar solos, soaring vocals, smattering drums and relatively catchy choruses. No real surprises and Mr Rob Rock’s vocals are very typical of the genre and not particularly interesting to be honest. The production is fairly typical of the genre and the sound offers nothing we haven’t heard before – the fact is that most of it have been heard in other songs before so they have been doing a little copying when writing the songs for this album. It is short and to the point so you don’t have to listen too long if you don’t like copycats, it is 35 minutes long and has ten tracks that doesn’t offer too much variation.

Well, it is not creativity, novelty or fantasy I come to think of when listening to this album. It is more like cliché, paint-by-numbers and such things I come to think of when hearing this stuff. It sounds like everything else in this genre, it is predictable and dreary, I think a new album by a band you haven’t heard before shouldn’t sound this familiar and this predictable. The real question I get when listening to this album, is what’s the point of it? I tend to think that novelty and quality are the traits that validate the existence and making of a new album and this album has neither of them, which is why I think it could just as well have remained undone.

To be honest I have nothing positive to say about this album, it is a pointless display of paint-by-numbers heavy metal with quite boring songs and a poor vocalist. There is however some reviewers that think this album is brilliant so maybe it has something I cannot hear and fans of heavy metal who dislikes anything that doesn’t sound stereotypical might like it quite a bit. I doubt however that anyone who wants a new album to sound fresh and have songs that are actually new will find it worth bothering with. To me it was a big yawn and a waste of time.

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