Tired, Angry, Bored... but Fun - "Storm the Gates" Review (51%)
Venom's music is simple. It isn't something that demands a considerable amount of investment to understand, as would albums like "The Epilogue to Sanity" and "Verminlust". The riffs are thunderous, the solos are rapid and distorted, the bass guitar is loud, the drums are heavy, the vocals are raw. The lyrics are borderline "try-hard" satanic, but that was always the case with Venom.
This "Storm the Gates" album sounds as if it had been recorded with a potato in some shabby basement in a dirty suburb of Newcastle. The band has kept playing the same type of music since it was "Welcome[d] to Hell". Calling it the Motörhead of speed metal would be a quite accurate description, albeit a bit insulting to Lemmy's NWOBHM titanic flagship. On a side note, they don't sound so overtly Motörhead inspired on this album as they did on their previous release "From the Very Depths", so that's that, I guess.
Despite the very easily grasped limits of their musicianship, the English trio has such a unique sound that it doesn't really matter anymore, and probably never really did. Much as with Sodom or Satanic Warmaster, you know what to expect from a Venom record. And this is exactly what you get with "Storm the Gates", more Venom.
Does it work? It "worked" for their entire career spawning well over four decades. Their music "works" well enough for a while, but isn't outstanding either, which is why despite their popularity and proficiency at releasing album after album, you cannot name a single Venom classic as you could with Burzum, Incantation or Bathory. And that pattern is most certainly not going to be altered with such a meek and timid release as "Storm the Gates".
In a few words, "Storm the Gates" is the mirror image of the band that created it... tired, weak, boring and derivative, yet somehow still managing to remain fun and entertaining to listen to, at least once in a while.
Tired, Angry, Bored... but Fun
"100 Miles to Hell" fails to convince with its faux angry satanic lyrics underlying the band's "mean metal" attitude. "Beaten to a Pulp Fiction", on the other hand, does its title justice and is one of the more intense songs on the record. "Destroyer of Satan's Ass", the Warkvlt cover (from "Bestial War Metal") is slower and has a quite eerie atmosphere which makes it stand out but it doesn't lack the dirty brutality of the original and blends in nicely. The riffs in "Immortal Sucks and Demonaz is a Cuck", likely in reference to the Abbath/Demonaz wife fucking affair, are the most energetic and memorable on the record.
"Storm the Gates" obviously also includes some fillers as many tracks sound quite exchangeable from other, both on this record and in Venom's discography. "Bring Out Your Dead" starts a little bit too abruptly, features odd transitions and could have been played by three teenagers in an unclean rehearsal garage in the early eighties that have only been playing their instruments for about a month. "Suffering Dictates" seems to suffer itself, if you'll excuse the weak pun, from an equally weak musicianship even for Venom's low standards, but that might have been the band's intention. As "ironic art". "We the Louder with Crowder", apparently an attempt to create a WWE-intro type anthem, ends up sounding almost amusingly amateurish and stereotypical.
In the end, Venom's "Storm the Gates" is interesting for those who like Venom's blackened speed metal of the early years with an angry "mean metal" spirit, borrowed essentially from Warkvlt's brand of war metal. The music obviously doesn't have anything to do with black metal except for a few minor references to Vikings and Paganism - and not "Hollywood Satanism" - in the lyrics. In addition to the obvious Immortal diss, that is.
Overall, "Storm the Gates" is violently fun, and it entertains for a while but ends up being forgotten as soon as it's over. Perhaps lamp-shading the band Venom itself? Well, as I said, at least they moved on from the Motörhead bandwagon. If only every crypto cover band in black metal could do the same.
Storm the Gates score: 51/100.
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