Thirty years ago, a trio of drunken miscreants who called themselves Venom released a pair of albums that revolutionized the still-young heavy metal genre. Welcome to Hell and Black Metal served as a slap in the face to headbangers and a launching pad for extreme metal. The influence those two albums had on the development of thrash and black metal can't be overstated; unfortunately that was the pinnacle of Venom's achievements in the realm of heavy metal.
They've released eleven albums since Black Metal, but none of them have been able to recapture that early black magick. On From the Very Depths, the band's fourteenth release, Venom (or Cronos and two guys who aren't Mantas and Abaddon) once again vie for the affections of the heavy metal community, and the result is what you'd expect given the band's decades long string of mediocre albums.
From the Very Depths isn't bad necessarily. Cronos, Rage, and Dante are all decent to good musicians, but there's a distinct lack of hellfire on most of the songs. The album starts off somewhat promising with the one-two punch of the galloping title track and "The Death of Rock n' Roll," the the momentum those two songs establish is quickly drained by the plodding and over-long "Smoke." With it's repetitive groove metal riffing, the song would have been tedious at three minutes in length, but Venom choose to stretch the track out to a mind numbing five minutes.
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"Smoke " is a much better bellwether of what to expect from From the Very Depths than the two superior earlier tracks. The majority of the songs on the album are either too long or feel too long due to repetition. The album itself is four songs too long, as well. From the Very Depths really should have ended with the mildly catchy "Grinding Teeth." Instead, the band soldiers on with four more completely forgettable tracks. Really, the only songs on the album that flow and don't spiral into tedium are "From the Very Depths," "The Death of Rock n' Roll," and "Long Haired Punks." Out of those three, only "Long Haired Punks" feels like the Venom of old.
Most of the power of Venom's early material comes from the speed and reckless abandon of the music. Cronos, Abaddon, and Mantas were barely competent as musicians and they knew it. They compensated for their musical deficiencies by just going full steam ahead on every song. This new iteration of the band definitely has better musical chops, but they sound neutered. The best that can be said of most of the songs on From the Very Depths is that they sound workmanlike.
It's tempting to write Venom off as a group of guys lazily exploiting the band's legacy, but that's almost certainly not the case. Cronos sounds like he's still having fun with the music he's writing which is a good thing. Unfortunately, a lot of the material on From the Very Depths sounds like rejected White Zombie b-sides. Maybe one day Cronos will rediscover his inner barbarian, but that day definitely hasn't come yet.
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