Eighteen Visions

The audacity required to entitle your second readily available full-length The Best Of is truly startling, but if the band has the intestinal fortitude and, more importantly, the music to pull it off, more power to them. Such is the case with Eighteen Visions, whose brashness, cockiness and self-proclaimed "rock'n'roll kids playing metal in a hardcore band" mandate has chaffed some in the metallic hardcore scene, causing the band to boldly state "you love to hate us" in the liner notes. Sure, they just may be the glam rock pariahs of hardcore metal, but they rock, plain and simple. The Best Of features one new song, "Motionless and White," and ten previous released out-of-print tracks, re-recorded and infused with Eighteen Visions' current sound and swagger. "Motionless and White" continues their utilisation of metallic hardcore staples while throwing in more groove and clean, melodic segments contrasted against breakdowns, grind/mid-tempo mosh and choruses. However, it is the re-recorded material that shines. "Russian Roulette With A Trigger Happy Manic Depressive," "Slipping Through The Hands of God" and "Dead Rose," amongst others, showcases Eighteen Visions with a groovier, thrash/death-inspired sound, liberally throwing around the down-tuned, plodding death riffs that nu metal appropriated and subsequently ruined, with catchy metallic hardcore tangents and the occasional "yeah!" While theoretically not conveying anything groundbreaking (oft times coming across like a bastard combination of noisecore and undiluted mosh metal), Eighteen Visions possesses an intangible charisma that stakes a claim to a unique identity, instilling their songs with a catchiness and marauding atmosphere that, above all else, rocks.