Malevolence have cropped up a few times on the site, particularly in live reviews and most memorably when they laid waste to the Ronnie James Dio stage at Bloodstock 2024. Flying all the way in from the US for one show, they made the most of it. Generating a circle pit that dwarfed most others I’ve seen at Catton Hall and breaking the record for crowd surfers (901!) they certainly know how to get a crowd going.
But you can’t do this without a decent soundtrack. Well Malevolence add eleven new songs to their pick list for the next time you see them live with Where Only The Truth Is Spoken. Each track is heavier than a pallet of bricks (or, indeed Brick Tops if you want a sideways reference to their video for “If It’s All The Same To You”) and so down-tuned it’s a wonder they don’t trip over the slack guitar strings.
Despite battering the hell out of your ears for all eleven tracks, they’ve got a tremendous number of tools to perform the job. It’s easy to create a soul destroying noise, not so easy to do it almost a dozen times in different ways. The added bonus is that each and every one wouldn’t be out of place at a gig. They’ve got that hook, the breakdowns, angry choruses you can shout, pauses for you to grab your breath before the insanity ramps up a notch… these are songs designed to be a soundtrack to chaos.
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From the opening battery of “Blood To The Leech” to the fading chords of “With Dirt From My Grave” you will not heard a heavier, more crushing album this year. It’s up there with Bleed From Within’s Zenith and that is some high (deserved) praise. The lack of bagpipes is either a selling point or a missed trick depending on your point of view.
This is normally where I’ll pull out a couple of highlights, but this is tricky as there are so many of them. From first play, Where Only The Truth Is Spoken had me hooked and there are so many good songs that picking out a gem is like digging through Smaug’s hoard for that one particularly sparkly number. If there’s a ruby in the pile, though, it’s “Salt The Wound” as it stands out by being significantly different to the rest. Clean guitars and a trippy melody make up the lengthy opening before the harsher side kicks in, but even then it’s tempered somewhat making for quite an unusual song compared to the rest of the album.
Honestly, if they played a festival set tomorrow simply made up of this album in order then there would be wonderful, wonderful carnage and everyone would head to the beer tent afterwards more than satisfied. This is an album that gets the blood pumping and the listener yearning for a muddy field and a 400,000W amplifier setup.
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Header image by Ramsey Ramone
Where Only The Truth Is Spoken is out on June 20th
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