Album Review: I Prevail - 'Violent Nature'
I Prevail live up to their name, prevailing in the wake of Brian Burkheiser’s departure to deliver a beautiful and blisteringly heavy behemoth of a fourth album.
In the wake of co-vocalist Brian Burkheiser’s departure, I Prevail have entered a bold new chapter with ‘Violent Nature’. Now fronted solely by Eric Vanlerberghe, who takes full reins on both clean and unclean vocals, the Michigan outfit deliver their most emotionally fraught and sonically aggressive project to date. If there was ever doubt about how I Prevail would evolve post-Burkheiser, Violent Nature shatters those uncertainties into the dirt with a bloodied fist.
The album opens with a haunting bang. Opener ‘Synthetic Soul’ channels the ghost of Linkin Park’s ‘The Catalyst’, weaving eerie minor-key piano with Vanlerberghe’s resigned, almost whispered vocals, each word feeling like it’s been dragged out of him. It’s a track drenched in tension, anxiety bristling beneath every note as the almost confessional track builds and builds; when it erupts, then, bursting into a cathartic, skyward chorus that tears free from the oppressive instrumentals, it feels like a scream through a thunderstorm. Vanlerberghe’s guttural roars crash in like tidal waves, bubbles of air snatched from the stormy instrumentals, raging against the maelstrom, only to recede into a delicate, melancholic close that mirrors the intro — full circle, full impact.
To think that it’s one of the lighter tracks of the album feels harrowing.
There’s ‘NWO’, a tidal wave of vitriol that threatens to smash you against the rocks, a breathless onslaught of seething hate and unchecked rage, whipping between Helguera’s blast beats and Menoian’s breakdowns like the epicentre of an earthquake. There’s the title track ‘Violent Nature’, an otherwise unassuming 130 seconds that more than lives up to its name, an unrelenting auditory barrage of primal rage, snarling and smashing its way into the band’s new era. ‘God’, a disgustingly heavy track that leaves you as tense and riled up as you are in awe at what the new era of I Prevail have to offer. So heavy, so grotesque in its ferocity, you half expect some of Will Ramos’s pig squeals to come oinking past the blast beats. Even closer ‘Stay Away’ has some bite to it, the track’s swirling, Deftones-esque atmosphere equal parts eerie and ethereal as it slithers and coils itself around your brain, a trail of guttural venom in its wake.
But you’d kind of expect that, given Vanlerberghe.
What comes as more of a surprise, then, are the rest of the tracks. From the somewhat exhausted, introspective beauty of ‘Pray’, shifting from madness to melancholy in the blink of an eye, to the more melodic, slow-burning steadiness of ‘Rain’, beads of condensation dripping from each line as the eye of the Violent Nature tempest makes itself known, there’s a good helping of the more melodic side of metalcore as well. Just look at the crushing weight of the more cinematic ‘Annihilate Me’, somehow both astronomically large and claustrophobically captivating at the same time, or the defiant ‘Into Hell’, enraged even in its despair.
But, you say, Vanlerberghe’s done the emotional metalcore route before. Damn well, in fact, but it’s not necessarily new ground.
Enter, ‘Crimson & Clover’. Sandwiched between ‘Into Hell’ and the brutal ‘God’, the acoustic ballad becomes all the more beautiful, as if finding some halcyon relic in the aftermath of disaster. Vanlerberghe lays himself bare, sounding like he’s crying into the abyss the rest of the album carved open, the destroyed wreckage arrayed around him — some grief to balance out the brutality, as if mourning the vivid, admittedly beautiful violence of the rest of the album.
And it’s this counterweight, as short as it might be, that makes what’s a fair contender for I Prevail’s heaviest album to date also feel their most cohesive. The departure of Burkheiser could have easily marked the end; instead, it’s just the start of something new. Whether it’s the adrenaline-pumping breakdowns, the atmospheric ballads, or the whispered confessions drowned in reverb and rage — whichever way you look at it, ‘Violent Nature’ is simply superb.
Words by James O’Sullivan
