Album Review

Malefice - VMalefice – V

The UK has been home to many great bands and seeing bands from my own country thrive brings me excessive amounts of pleasure, so that there then leads me to this new album from Reading based bruisers Malefice; “V” is new for 2013 and I must say as much as I love them a 7 track album feels just a tad stingy but never the less it’s all about quality not quantity, they have always had their own distinctive style it displayed leaps and bounds in regards to technical writing and the dynamics of some of their material has been unreal at times.

The title track here opens up the album and I must say holy fucking shit! Excuse me but where the hell has this come from?! They’ve always been fantastic writers but the production value and sheer quality of tone they have going on here is next level to anything they’ve put out so far, with the keyboards and what not I can feel a sense of American act Still Remains but far past anything they could have ever hoped to produce, they fall between tech metal and metalcore as here you can hear the breakdowns and drops but… I don’t know what to say because I pure and simply was not prepared for something like that, it fits into the route that a lot of British acts have been taking as of late such as Bleed From Within and BMTH; instead though of simply follow the status quo they’ve retained the aggressive technical side of themselves that is what I loved, they’ve mixed that with some gnarly sub drops and dirty breakdowns to bring forward a new era of Malefice material. There are even clean vocal lines on some songs as well bringing together the full metalcore package wrapped in a tight film of impressive musical ability (“The Great Deceiver”, “Wasted” & “Blueprint” for reference).

I am completely and utterly gobsmacked; so much in fact that without a moment of hesitation I can safely say the quantity vs. quantity comment I originally made can be tallied up successfully to say quality by far overpowered the quantity but my God, I wish there was more to this record. Top notch material that definitely warrants this being on my list of considerable album of the year candidates.

4.5/5

Review by James Webb

 Band Members

Dale Butler
Ben Symons
Andrew Wilson
Tom Hynes
Chris Allan-Whyte
 Track Listing
1. V
2. The Great Deceiver
3. Never Say Die
4. Wasted
5. Time
6. Blueprints
7. Reach Up
 Band Related Links
Malefice Facebook
 Review Score Code
- Top Cheese
- Brilliant
- Pretty damn good
- Ok I guess
- What Was That?