Let's just do an easy one here. Hive is a Minneapolis based hardcore band that just fucking steamrolls you for thirty straight minutes with absolutely fucking brutal crust/d-beat insanity. The guitar tone is monstrously heavy, and as a result there's some deceptive influence from the old Swedeath bands of yore (they were never shy about their punk influence, after all), but this is pretty straight Entombedcore of the more hardcore variety.
Though I may be primarily a metal blog, this shouldn't be taken as a bad thing. Hive is fucking gargantuan, and I like them for the same reason I liked Enabler so much. I realize that any wayward fan of this style of music who might stumble on this review might be pulling their hair out at me comparing them to Swedish death metal and a relatively flash-in-the-pan band from a few years ago who disbanded in shame after it came out that the frontman was an abusive rapist, but I think half the fun of exploring genres you're unfamiliar with is connecting dots as an outsider that longtime scene veterans will totally miss. Like yeah, Hive is 100% part of the punk scene and has basically zero connection to metal itself, so it'd make way more sense to compare them to His Hero is Gone or Anti Cimex or Wolfbrigade or something, but the concept of punk that was so fucking heavy that I couldn't even comprehend it as something punk was something totally foreign to me until comparatively recently. So I'll catch myself using quasi-imaginary terms and scenes like "Entombedcore" to describe something that has so much more in common with The Plot Sickens than Left Hand Path, but I think it can be helpful in order to sort of help this style make sense to people like me who do come from a background of dirty headbanging as opposed to politically charged punk rock played at double speed and tuned three or four steps lower than what most of us think punk is. I don't even know what I'm talking about right now, but I guess what I'm saying is that Hive probably sounds like another band in a flood of hundreds to people familiar with the scene they belong to, but for an outside interloper like me, I can describe it as a blend between Carnage and Discharge and it'll make exactly as much sense, only viewed from a different lens.
So with all of that rambling out of the way, the actual meat of the review is going to be very short, because I should've made it clear by now that Most Vicious Animal is rooted in a scene I'm only peripherally familiar with. From the metalhead perspective, I can best describe this as "Discharge but way heavier and meaner with a Dismember-esque guitar tone blended with some of the slower parts of early Nails records". So what we get is twelve tracks, and like nine of them are comprised almost entirely of short bursts of aggression and d-beats with a handful of longer tracks that turn the pace down and replace the speed with sheer fucking brutality. "Deceiving Days" is one of these slower ones and it's also easily my favorite song on the record (probably entirely because it's the most metal-adjacent track with those monstrously heavy grooves). Overall though, those gratuitously heavy chugs that spring up from time to time are used as complements to the abrasive crust punk that populates most of the record, and the whole package winds up being wildly appealing to metalheads like me and at the end of the day that's all I can really say. This bridges a gap between two fandoms, and there are oodles of bands that do that, I know, but just like how Enabler was a random band that introduced me to a style that I didn't really explore at the time, Hive simply has the advantage of cosmic luck on their side in being one of the first bands I really gave a whole lot of time to in the style.
I'm spending too much time trying to justify why I'm even covering this, when the answer is truly as simple as "This fucking rules and you should just go buy it right now".
RATING: 89%
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