SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: VIMIC – OPEN YOUR OMEN

VIMIC
OPEN YOUR OMEN
INDEPENDENT

It’s been a little over four years since former Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison passed on, and heavy metal communities around the globe still feel the pain of his absence. It’s a rare and profound treat to see this kind of release ready for the listening public’s embrace. The posthumous release is the official, unreleased Vimic debut, which never saw the light of day back when singles were coming out for it in 2016. Now, it’s finally ready to be released unto the masses, in all its glory.

The LP we receive is a 15-track meditation, despite the loud and abrasive sounds that are almost always smacking you in the face from every imaginable angle throughout its duration. It’s a 60-min barrage of mostly fully-structured, well-rounded, hard-hitting modern metal bangers that are impeccably in touch with the contemporary sensibilities of melodic metal and rock ‘n’ roll. If anything, it’s a gigantic credit towards Jordison as the mastermind of this record, as it appears he’s able to keep his finger on the pulse of culturally significant music and its most attractive sensibilities almost a decade after a great majority of these songs were written.

All the common metal accoutrements are firing on all cylinders, and this template provides a thorough playground for Vimic to enlist these tracks. The tracks bounce back and forth between Megadethesque ‘90s thrash nostalgia and semi-progressive electronically-charged anthems. If you’re a fan of modern metal and the prominent figures in that particular scene, I’m willing to bet money that there is, at the very least, a handful of songs on this lengthy LP that you’ll find yourself visiting repeatedly throughout the future. Even when Vimic breaks tradition and finds itself associating with rhythmic sensibilities that have the potential to find themselves adjacent with the current landscape of pop music, they are smothering those catchy hooks in skate-park-nostalgia blast kick drum beats and heavily downtuned breakdown riffs; there are a few moments on the LP that will have you thinking you’re listening to post-Meteora Linkin Park, but Open Your Omen operates on such a consistently rotating carousel that you’re bound to get a small taste of every possible angle metal could be attacked from, for better or for worse.

In this sense, the LP operates as an essential and beautiful homage to the life and legacy of Joey Jordison: a human being who never cared what others thought of his bold and explosive musical efforts as long as it sounded effective to him . . . and isn’t that what we need the most in this day and age? LPs that are exciting, that remind us of what it was like to hear that butterfly-effect-moment record for the very first time and think: “Oh, wow. Music can be like this?” It’s not the most consistent project in the world, and I’d be lying if I said some of its more genre-blending moments didn’t miss the mark by a mile. However, at the end of the day, there’s an attitude throughout this record, on behalf of all the recording artists, that is undeniable and near impossible to shake. Don’t be surprised if you hear some of these songs on the radio within the next few weeks.

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