Review Summary: Fun, charismatic, and furious, Vianova have crafted a metalcore debut to rival the best of them...
There’s always been tension between music fans who like stuff that pushes the envelope and those who prefer their music to not stray too far from the genre’s roots. Ostensibly, people love to be there at the beginnings of a group that’s taking their favorite sounds in bold new directions. The pleasure of thinking (or bragging) that you were there at the beginning is a powerful dopamine hit for many music listeners. At the same time, revivalism in the music scene is thriving, especially with millennials who ironically curse their parents for failing to adapt to change. Emo has to be on its 11th or 12th iteration of itself by now and early 2000’s -core is making a comeback in a big way, all dusted with a shoegazey fuzz Deftones popularized in the 90s. So where does a band like Vianova fit in this landscape as a band that was conceived with the idea of heavy envelope manipulation in mind while retaining the essence of their influences? The answer is easy, they belong in your rotation, because with
Hit It!, Vianova not only balance their genre-fluid approach to metalcore effortlessly, they’ve released one of its better debuts in recent memory.
As soon as
Hit It! starts and the auto-tuned vocals in opener “Squier Talk” ring out you can just hear the collective sigh from a good portion of listeners. Make no mistake,
Hit It! is a thoroughly, unabashedly
modern piece of work where swing and gospel sit alongside its crushing guitars and aggressive drumming like familiar bedfellows. Admittedly on paper, the formula is not especially appealing, but in practice the band handles their intentions with a maturity and technical savvy of a band well beyond their years.
Hit It! hits the listener with five straight bangers to start out, with the second track “Más Rápido” serving as a great taste of the band’s style, a thin layer of ostentation with a serious knack for intensely catchy songwriting underneath. The ostentation being thin is what makes
Hit It! work so well, as the band never uses their zany flourishes to replace good songwriting or even as a standalone highlight within the tracks. It’s all in service of the band’s core offering meticulously crafted metalcore.
And it’s “Marimba” that shows the band firing on all cylinders. While not completely devoid of the production flourishes the rest of the album contains, it’s easily the most breakneck and straightforward track on
Hit It! and proof positive of the band’s advanced musicality. Its dizzying rhythmic arrangements swirl and mesh fluidly with vocalist Alex Kerski’s unique delivery, adding to the intensity as the song slows and swells with half-time sections and tempo changes that would make Tesseract and Periphery shed a tear in pride. In fact, there’s no one aspect of
Hit It! that’s propped up by another. The drums and guitars are produced perfectly, with the drums’ clarity and weight being a particular highlight amongst the chaos of the songs. On a more intangible level, once “Whatever Alright’s” sultry, danceable groove ends, one can’t help but feel the band’s confidence and charisma that permeates these songs. It’s hard to not be charmed when a group use their powers for fun the way Vianova does with
Hit It!. And much in the same way that Twelve Foot Ninja blended genre-bending heaviness with a wink and a smile, Vianova have effortlessly slid into the vacuum created by that band’s dissolution, and they are sprinting with the torch.
