Ever since Vital Remains’ “Dechristianize”, it has been four years until the release of their newest full-length album “Icons of Evil”. On “Dechristianize”, Vital Remains raised their standard to an extreme level of brutality and the new “Icons of Evil” follows this new path perfectly. Speed and extreme agressiveness are the keywords of this album, while at the same time the music is technically superb.

The sound on the whole album is overall thick and very heavy and most of the agression is generated by the extremely fast and tight drums which keep on raging all the time. Subject of Vital Remains’ wrath is christianity again and the very deep death growls of Glen Benton convincingly emphasize the evil that is this religion.
On guitars the music is handled extremely well, displaying a great technical potential with intricate solo-esque guitar riffs during the whole track.
The drawbacks of this album are however lack of originality, the near-eternity prolonged length of the tracks and the solo`s which are odd and very much out of place in most tracks.
All tracks sound the same, with the same full-time raging drums, unchanging low growls and unimaginative riffs.

In other words: “Icons of Evil” sounds completely the same as the last album “Dechristianize”, only it is more repetitive. Even the entire beginning of the album sounds the same as “Dechristianize”: from the dramatic torturing in the first tracks, the screams after this and the epic-yet-brutal first real track on the album.
Though unoriginal, this wouldn’t be very bad if the solo`s would have been left out. Whenever a solo in a track threatens to occur, the speed goes down to a crawl and some epic-sounding solo follows. Undoubtedly the solos are technically extremely good but they just seem completely out of place in a brutal track over 250 bpm.
However there are a few tracks on this album that truly stand out and are worth listening to. “Hammer Down the Nails”, the thrashing “Shrapnell Embedded Flesh” and “In Infamy” are raging masterpieces without the annoying slowing down.

”Icons of Evil” could have been much more than this unoriginal piece of anti-christian brutality. However, if you like extremely fast and aggressive death metal, then you might want to hear “Icons of Evil”. Decent but not very good.