Review Summary: Rusted gears grinding, the machine is dying
Circuits severed, limbs twitching, then shrieking, then convulsing, spluttering, crying, writhing ... ending:
This World Is Going to Ruin You is the death of the machine.
I really don’t know what that means. However(!), it’s the only way I’ve found to accurately articulate just how Vein(.fm)’s sophomore LP
feels as it rattles around my bewildered, shell-shocked noggin. Synthetic synapses spark and crackle via the Boston 5-piece’s revered fusion of nu-metal revivalism and modern mathcore shenanigans, each track adding another glorious jerking movement to their macabre, digital death rattle.
Brick-walled by design, Errorzone 2.0’s frequencies bleed through one another into an unapologetic murk, the resultant weave of wires cementing the LP’s mangled, artificial aesthetic. Its opening moments set the scene: the dense booming of “Welcome Home” giving way to sheer terror in “The Killing Room” and “Versus Wyoming” - all furious clunking and scraping and
noise - before “Fear In Non Fiction” brings the whole damn thing crashing down in a Converge-meets-Deftones styled scorcher. Each ceaseless breakdown serves the whole in a way the genre’s best only know how, culminating in a tour de force of everything my inner caveman craves (see also the nostalgic turntable silliness concluding “Inside Design”, delightfully groove-laden “Hellnight” and rapid-fire Slipknot-y garbling a la “Orgy in the Morgue”). Vein.fm outdo themselves, however, with their final lurching breath. Pensive closers “Wavery” and “Funeral Sound” are, it’s safe to say, utterly
brilliant: exchanging the ever-changeable leanings of the glitchy preceding tracks for patient, palpable
dread. The system shuts down to the tune of faint piano keys and static, with the occasional
nightmarish riff reminding you of what once lived. And then:
nothing. It’s over.
Finally, you let yourself breathe,
exhausted. And the meltdown begins anew…
