Accident Prone’s ‘Deep Wound Red’ Blasts Away Expectations For Brutally Heavy Music

Heavy music persists as excitingly expansive in the hand’s of Virginia’s Accident Prone. On their 2018 release Deep Wound Red, they take the brutal baseline that bands of their vein work with and connect it to spastic “mathcore” vibes, twisted themes, and an overarching sense of intriguing darkness.

Lingering on the fence just doesn’t work for heavy bands. There’s that beginning point — represented by the admittedly vague word “heavy” — but a band has got to do something with the heaviness to make their mark. Otherwise, they’re just a forgettable member of an array of similarly forgettable pieces.

Accident Prone’s work contrasts as “human,” and it’s much harder for a listener to ignore a metaphorically human work standing in front of them than it is for them to dismiss something that’s just loud.

The band members do anything but linger on the fence. They are completely liberated from hyper-focused suffocating genre restrictions, blasting through the aforementioned technical/mathcore vibes while staying, to put it simply, brutal.

Sometimes overly technical playing gets “artsy,” which certainly works for some bands but has been done before. The members of Accident Prone infuse their playing with an in-your-face intensity that makes Deep Wound Red stand out.

Intriguingly, synthesizing those two themes, Accident Prone almost sounds like a horror story of a band (in the good, inviting way). The band dynamically connects their “horror” to something both musically and thematically personable, which like any number of the popular horror movies out there will tell you, helps the art stick. Although they certainly figured as an intriguing part of the story, most of those who saw 2018’s A Quiet Place in theaters didn’t do so in order to explore the fascinating story of the anatomy of alien invaders.

Rather than sticking to the “monstrous” side of their work, Accident Prone digs Deep Wound Red into position to take on listeners’ psyches. That result is helped along by the vocalist’s work; his singing style is at once shredding and accessible (at least to those who are familiar with this musical style to begin with). He himself is anything but monotone, screaming his desire for someone else’s eyes so that he can sleep at night.

Taking someone’s eyes isn’t a picture that’s easily dismissed — and similarly, Deep Wound Red is poised to have fans stick around and dig in for the foreseeable future.

5/5 Stars

Listen via Bandcamp.