Virgin Snatch – Act of Grace (2008)

Today in our huge promo-to-review queue we find Virgin Snatch’s “Act of Grace”, the band’s fourth release since their formation on 2001. Playing a very interesting mixture of Trash Metal with Modern Metal elements, more specifically Groove elements, we find “Act of Grace” a very interesting release… musically. The album is very fresh, sounding more like melodic Metal releases in some parts, since there are plenty of well crafted passages that sound like anything, except Trash Metal.

With a name like Virgin Snatch, we were about to immediately throw this to the queue of Grindcore/’shit we don’t really want to listen’ list, but we decided against it after doing some research on the band. You should not discard them because of this either, since this Polish band is worth a listen.

The problems with “Act of Grace” (for some) are probably also its best characteristics (for others), the combination of clean vocals with some harsh screams sounds very out of place most of the time and creates a very unexpected sound that sometimes. The use of modern Metal elements also gives freshness to this release, but this will also turn all the die hard Trash Metal fans away.

Having identified the problems, we can say that half the clean vocals are decent, but it songs like “It’s Time” they sound too ‘commercial’ for us, and for the genre itself. The harsh screams are mixed weirdly and sound a bit higher than the regular vocals. The modern Metal influences in the riffing style and the distortion gives the album a very different feeling than most albums these days, but they also take away from the ‘Trashiness’ of this release.

With brilliant melodic sections like on “M.A.D”, and “It’s Time”, the band shows a more melodic aspect to their music and these songs actually provide a very nice change in pace from the rest of the music, but on “It’s Time” the Power Metal-esque vocals kill the feeling and the atmosphere created by the riffs.

Overall, we think that “Act of Grace” has very solid ideas, but the band fails to integrate them to their Trash sound properly. There is no doubt that there is quality in this band, but there is also a lot of confusion when it comes to keeping songs consistent. We hope this band does a better job in future releases since they have the right ideas; they just need to structure their music more cohesively.

Release: Nov 2008

Country: Poland