Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Anarchy and Punk are rarely subtle when it comes to beating the backside of oppression and misplaced comfortable tyranny, the cane is flexed, the motion swift and like a growl from the stage, the meaning is clear. It might not always get the result it is searching for but it does leave an impression, large, scalding and full of rebuke, on the corpulent, the ill of compassion and those that profiteer on the bodies of those that die by the bullet, the bomb and the propaganda

Fattened By The Horrors of War the machine rumbles on with very few it seems willing to fight back, not just with words but with action, a rallying call to the congregation, to the representatives of those perceived as the Vile Assembly, but to whom have the attitude of the justified anger in their veins and in the way they express themselves through music.

For the Vile Assembly and their album Fattened By The Horrors of War, it is not just an exchange of words or suitable rhetoric designed to whip up the frenzy in the pulpit beneath their feet at the back street stage, it is a demonstrative truth that they sing with conviction, with honour and with the sadness of what has taken place in the name of war and the greed in the belly of those that perpetuate the myth that the machine does everything it can to not cross the line.

The album is Punk but not in a two minute inarticulate way, it has power, meaning and solidarity sewn through its beautiful, devil soul and the band have captured a vibe which is keen and more importantly, honest.

In tracks such as Body Bags, Last Century Man, Suicide Feast and the brilliant Cunning Man, Vile Assembly take the nature and damned of the last forty years and show just exactly what has been achieved. Remove the technological advances and the so called social upheaval, what has been noticeable is the disbandment of all that was supposed to be good, worthwhile and proper, that the gap between those who fight for a cause is being weighed down by the excess of those who say exporting arms, selling flesh, removing the undeserving is good for the economy.

Fattened By The Horrors of War is a trip down what could be, if the fight had stayed fair. An album of punch and panache.

Ian D. Hall