Year of Desolation "Your Blood, My Vendetta" CD
[Corrosive]
Ehhh, I'm not really into this. The band seems competent but stupid song titles like "The Legend of Yellow Boobie" and "I Kicked Sideshow Bob's Ass", among others, absolutely rub me the wrong way right off the bat, so it doesn't help that their style is a brand of frantic metalcore that hits on everything from churning death metal to caustic dissonance to melodic Swedish riffing in the blink of an eye. There are some killer breaks here and there, but the songwriting is really jumbled, so they just kind of roll from riff to riff to riff to riff until three to five minutes has passed. Initially the recording bothered me, but despite some persistent problem areas I got used to it after a couple of songs. It's pretty thick, and I can live with it, but it still needs work. The harsh vocal screams are a little thin compared to the instrumentation, but I think the bass presence needs to fill the gaps better regardless, as that might bring some cohesion to the music. Other than that I'd like the guitar tone to be a little warmer, since the drums sound pretty good (though the percussion needs to be mixed more evenly since the snare pops out a lot). There's just an edge of ruggedness that's not really benefiting them, though they're not too far from the mark for what they're doing. The biggest problem though is that the songwriting approach here is mainly just stacking a bunch of riffs together with no sense of transition or coherent feeling, so a riff might catch your ear here or there, but there's no single song that's actually strong through and through. For example, a couple of churning grooves pop up in tracks like "Sheer Terror" to provide some breathing room, and "The Road to Fear" actually has some convincing death/thrash riffs going on, but both songs eventually crumble into a senseless flurry of changes and shifts (though admittedly the latter is the closest to a concrete song as you'll find on this one). Similarly the clean intro to "The Legend of Yellow Boobie" isn't bad except for the fact that the clean tone is way too dry and raw to do the riffs justice, but within a minute they're wandering all over the place again, so... it's of little concern in the long run. And honestly, most of these songs sound pretty damn similar to one another anyway. The midpaced chunkiness that kicks off "L.S.M." isn't half bad and they hold it together for about a minute or so (as usual), but again... by the midway point it's a mishmash of mosh parts and boring tremolo picking (every tremolo picking run on the entire CD is terrible). The layout's not that hot either. The entire package consists of images of a dead female body on a bed with blood all over the place, with the inner spread set up like a criminal case file regarding this particular murder, where all of the band members are the perpetrators. The inner spread looks pretty solid, but the concept is really typical and both the text and photographs on the outer package look a little rough. No lyrics are included, so my hope is that the silly song titles have nothing to do with the lyrical content, but either way... they should definitely consider a more serious approach. I don't know, I just don't get into this brand of metalcore very often. Since there are only a couple of sloppy performance areas or passages that seem out of tune, I do think the band could do some damage if they took their best riffs and built songs around them rather than tossing in every single note they ever come up with, but the fact of the matter is that these songs are simply not powerful. The band is basically generic and unoriginal in every sense, down to the layout and the "humorous" song titles, so... I'll pass. (4/10)
Running time - 37:05, Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: I'm not a fan of any of the complete songs]
Corrosive Recordings - http://www.corrosiverecordings.com

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