Sat backstage at Temples Festival in May 2015 were five quiet, unassuming, polite young people, looking for all the world like competition winners nervously waiting in chairs to be shuffled through to meet Taylor Swift having been told to be on best behaviour by their Ma. Fast forward an hour and those five, quiet, unassuming, polite young people had transmogrified into a flailing, seething ten legged beast, spewing forth carnage and devastation. Not Tiamat, no, something far more deadly than that; they had become Venom Prison.

And so, with a buzz that began as a whisper now as incessant as a swarm of wasps inches from your eardrum, the cult of Venom Prison is set to enhance and further itself once more with the release of their debut EP, The Primal Chaos (Soaked In Torment); four tracks, twelve minutes that kick you in the groin and then taser you in the gut until defecation occurs.

The tasering occurs from the lashings of modern death metal wrought with hardcore sensibilities and feel, welded into a substantial spear of chugging attack, while the groinal devastation comes from a thick production that, unlike most present-day death metal sounds, allows room to breathe and spits a raw, live sound, a welcome change to the clinical, dry, overproduced and emotionless offal cuts that so many of today fart out; The Primal Chaos has just the right amount of sloppy to feel like the thump of a ten-ton hammer.

Larissa’s vocals are more scream than guttural, but that suits the urgency expounded by the South Wales quintet, and adds to the overall feel of a contemporary death metal meets metallic hardcore band dousing their offspring in the lighter fluid of the old school 90’s underground before tossing a flaming rag at it and watching the primal chaos burn.

7.5/10

STEVE TOVEY