REVIEW: The Last Ten Seconds Of Life – The Violent Sound (Album)

Pennsylvania quartet The Last Ten Seconds Of Life have become infamous for their downtuned, ungodly levels of heaviness laced with filth that hit as hard as a physical punch to the gut.  On The Violent Sound, they focus their efforts in a slightly more melodic direction.  Twelve entire tracks of genre-fluid filth, ooh my.

Little Black Line kicks off the album with, dare I say it, an almost Marilyn Manson-esque vocal opening the track.  No, I never thought I’d compare TLTSOL with MM but there you go, I did it, it works.  It really does work, too, this drawling clean vocal over crashing drums and chugging riffs.  I challenge any fan of heavy music to sit and listen to this track without doing themselves a little head nod at the very least.  This is catchy as fuck and it’s definitely a track that’s going to be on repeat at Invicta HQ.

There features some brutally forceful, straight up, no-fucking-about heaviness on the album as a whole but if the band needed to learn anything from their previous release, Soulless Hymns, back in early 2015 it was that deathcore can only take you so far.  It’s a genre that needs that little bit of spice, something different, something unique to mix it up.  Previously the band had laced this with shameless slam and aggression, but this time around they’ve kept all of the prior elements that made them such a hard-hitting success and added yet more elements to the mix.  For most bands this would be a bold move; you run the risk of throwing too much in there, overloading it, and losing your focus and signature sound.  Despite TLTSOL throwing a handful of ‘clean’ vocals in there, they manage to keep their trademark.  If anything, these new vocal additions refine their sound.

The Violent Sound features potentially the most disgusting ‘bleurgh’ of the album within the first thirty seconds.  The sort of ‘bleurgh’ that will turn venues upside down when emitted live.  There’s none of this typical snare to hi-hat bullshit that deathcore bands churn out time and time again; each drum fill, each chugging riff, each snarling vocal is different to the last, different to any other on the track.  It takes a lot to create an album in this genre that doesn’t get boring, repetitive, monotonous; I’m sure you’re thinking of several examples just reading that sentence.

The most noticeable thing about The Violent Sound as an album, is how each track varies from the next.  The tempo, vocal style, song structure; it’s all changed up and keeps the listener on their toes.

The Marilyn Manson reference returns with a vengeance on Casanova.  Honestly; it will never not be weird to compare a band of this amalgamation of genres to the goth king himself, but really, once you check out the lip-curling vocals and fast-paced chugging into, it’s hard not to see the resemblance.  That’s about where it ends though; once the slow, haunting lines of Take my body home // My heart’s turned to stone echo out in the closing moments, this is something most bands on the planet couldn’t execute this perfectly.

The opening growl of Blind Faith is delivered with such venom and malice, I’m honestly quite surprised that my face hasn’t melted clean off.  There’s nothing comparable to the feeling when a vocalist such as John Robert C executes that so flawlessly.  A very important thing to note, here, is that John is new to the band; joining in May and this will be his first release with them having previously been with My Bitter End.  It is undoubtedly his joining and influence that has shaped this new sound, but the rest of the band have also ensured that they’ve kept the grit and edge they were so well known for.  It’s hard, with a new vocalist, not to change your entire sound to fit around their style and approach to writing music.  No danger of that happening here though, so let’s move on.

You know how I was saying about no two tracks being the same?  There are some truly groovy bass lines chucked in to Wise Blood that are completely unexpected, but they do add a further edge to an already diverse album and go on to showcase the bands’ ability to twist things around.  John Robert C‘s vocal range is seriously impressive throughout, too.  It’s easy to see (or hear, as the case may be) the reasons he was snapped up by the band to front them following Storm Strope‘s departure.

Slow deathcore shouldn’t be a thing anymore.  I’ve lost count of the breakdowns.  The changes in tempo, the snarling viciousness of it all; it shouldn’t work, but it really fucking does.  The Last Ten Seconds Of Life have refined their sound, they’re operating at their peak.  The Violent Sound isn’t an album to introduce people to the genre, nor will it win over people who wrote it off years ago.  It will, however, break faces in pits, make bishops cry, turn stomachs and destroy your very soul if you’re already a fan of deathcore executed to perfection…with a few unexpected twists.