Youthful Californian thrashers Fate are trying their hand at the metalcore magic. Their début album Vultures sees them joining together the dark crunch of death and grind with the bright melodics of old-school thrash.
It’s not an entirely successful experiment, but that’s how you learn – and as they’re hardly out of high school, Fate are hopefully still acquainted with the learning mindset. Vultures makes it clear that the band have no shortcomings at the instrument level, however; the album’s flaws are the result of their influences not fully bedding down alongside each other.
Maybe the brief intro to Vultures, “Apostasy”, got my hopes up with its melodic feel – harmonised scalar runs are go! - but “Psychopathic Diary” and “Your Creed Is Greed” throw that to the wind before settling down to some really brutal and nasty metal. Cookie-monster vocals that belie the band’s average age are backed up road-drill drumming and guitars that chug and grind and squeal … Fate make a powerful noise that puts them on a level with their older peers, that’s for certain.
But there are continual reappearances of the melodic component of Fate’s sound. Vultures is peppered with these tuneful intrusions, and they’re very welcome, too - I can’t be the only person who’s getting bored of vanilla aggression.
It’s as if the two sides of Fate’s musical urges are engaged in a tug of war, and the angry side is the one that’s been at the steroids. It’s not that the melodic material isn’t any good, it’s that it just doesn’t fit alongside the crunch with equal status, constantly relegated to the corner seat by the songwriting or left out like the fifth kid at a Hungry Hippos sleepover.
The truth of the matter is that Vultures doesn’t suffer on the tracks where the bright stuff is left aside. Fate can do a very convincing velocity-grind sound, as demonstrated perfectly on “Of Riddance and Innocence” or the afore-mentioned “Your Creed Is Greed”.
But sat in the middle of the record, the title track of Vultures is a showcase for melodic suss, an instrumental piece with great double-harmony guitar work, hooky as hell without being too cheesy. Fate have both sides of the coin covered.
The problem is they rarely get the two styles to gel without it feeling forced or mismatched. “Battlegrounds Beneath My Feet” has some great technical lead riffs nestling among the almost-hardcore bludgeon, but then it opens into a rather mismatched mid-section that derails an otherwise coherent track. When Fate’s design works, though, it really works – “Ruins Of Necropolis” is a home run that ticks all the boxes on both sides, and a great way to bring Vultures to a close.
Fate have made a strong début showing, even before you consider their age, and all my criticism here should be taken in the way it’s meant – Vultures is an album that only disappoints because it shows so much potential. Watch out for Fate’s next one, though – if they manage to suss the formula they’ll be unstoppable.
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