Although Crepitation have been floating about the UK slam scene for a fair few years, 2015 marks the year of the outfit’s debut album The Violence Of The Slams, which is an in-your-face and all round noisy offering.
It’s a fairly good listen and a particularly striking element of the music is the vocals. There’s a good amount of versatility to be heard within them, with grunts, gurgles and deep growls being projected over the ten tracks, and the way the vocals move with the instrumentation in Velocirapist and the Slamosorearse Sex is something to behold. The instrumentation is good too, and the chugging guitar riffs and frenetically energetic drums add a lot of momentum to the piece.
However, it’s perhaps fair to say that there isn’t much variation from song to song, aside from the various song introductions taken from television shows and films, so it isn’t one of the most engaging listens at times. Additionally, the sound quality isn’t great – in particular, the drum mix is a little odd and it sounds like one of the elements of the drum kit is a couple of saucepans, making that part of the drum line sound stick out like a sore thumb. However, this could potentially be the sound that Crepitation were going for!
As a whole, it’s a pretty decent album – but a bit more variety certainly wouldn’t go amiss.
6/10
