Labels: Vendetta
Review by: Alex Hannan
Another slightly older release hitting the Collective Zine turntable in 2016. Vendetta put it out in 2014, and the band are now scattered widely in terms of distance and fairly inactive, according to their social media. CHILDREN OF GOD appear to have had this track left over as an outlier from 2012 recording sessions, and the length of it – just shy of ten minutes – has dictated the expensive, some would say wasteful, format of the one-sided 10″. Trailered initially as one song over two halves of a 7″, they seem to have deemed it important to keep its unity unbroken. The song might have worked well split, as it has a doubled structure – traversing from slow, doomy textures to sludgy metallic hardcore twice in its length.
It has a lush sun-rises-on-the-Gobi-desert intro, creaking strings and shimmers, feedback, an open tone pealing out and turning into a gravelly guitar frazz. Leisurely doom-ish guitars start to assert themselves. It bursts into dissonance and energy – a CURSED-like flavour, weaving queasy string bends into its texture. When it subsides at half-way, what sounds like a treated violin appears, tracing a repetitive three-note melody over mournfully twanged guitar, odd machinery crashings in the background. The end of the song kicks up the tempo again and reaches a saturation of noise, a repeated vocal motif roaring out over thick layers of guitars, which continue unaccompanied into the track for some time after the drums drop out.
Structurally and texturally it’s interesting, but the other content doesn’t really stand up to the weight of expectation around it – the austere die-cut sleeve that opens out to reveal that Nietzsche quote about the abyss, the seriousness with which the band seem to take themselves (asked if it matters whether people listen to their stuff or not, one replies, “I don’t know and I don’t think about what people are doing. If this music somehow speaks to them then I apologize that they feel that fucked up emotion that makes them connect to the songs.”) There’s a lack of inspiration in the nuts-and-bolts musical ideas, and the lyrics are full of vague accusation which may or may not deal with some members’ break with the activist community, referred to in interview – “Those who do not will not / Those who do not will never / Hear your voice get lost in white noise / The wolves are sheep dressed in disguise / It’s in their bones / It’s in their eyes / It’s in their rules / It’s in their lies.” On this showing, I’d have to say CHILDREN OF GOD would not be my first recommendation in this kind of arena – there are other folks doing this kind of thing with more charisma and better riffs.