It’s tough, crude and very bad-tempered. That’s good! The Vendetta plays hard core punk as it should be played. They do not mediate. They do not falter. They fucking play.

Everything is how it should be: The guitars are out of tune, the drums sound like trash cans, and the vocals are those of two drunk hooligans fighting over the last cold beer.

Terror Nation is obviously recorded in the back of a moving truck, chased by radioactive zombies. This EP shows us – in a matter of 19 furious minutes – how hardcore is supposed to be. Terror Nation doesn’t add anything new to the genre, but it immensely true to the traditions of punk. Actually the entire punk culture is defined here. If you ever need to explain a person everything about punk, just skip the talking and play the song “Nitro”. It’s 57 seconds of pure unrelenting energy, its sole message: “All night long / The party is on”!

If you accept that nothing new is on the table here, and you like hardcore punk… Go buy!

Of course simply excelling in one genre is not enough for some, and so The Vendetta has undertaken dark experiments. The question is: Did they create a monster?

When Worlds Collide is a full-length album, containing hip-hop remixes and remakes of Vendetta-songs, and I do not think myself capable of reviewing such a work. I’ve heard some pretty twisted hybrids – like the Diablo Swing Orchestra’s big band-rock’n’metal or the completely insane ska/folk metal/reggae/grindcore cocktail of Trollfest’s “Yameeka” – and I’ve discovered that my taste is wide and liberal. The problem here is that I do not know shit about hip-hop (and normally I don’t like it either). The rating of this album is presumably based more on my ignorance than anything else.

I can say as much: The singers from Vendetta – nicknamed T1 and T2 – doesn’t fit the hip-hop sound. They are excellent punk-vocalists, as mentioned above, but the way they drag out the lyrics, almost puking them, clashes unmusically with the abrupt machinegun-rapping I’ve come to expect from bands like Clawfinger, Primus and Rage Against the Machine (the closets thing to hip-hop in my collection). On the other hand, some of the hip-hop-parts are simply too soft for the hardcore punk background. The last thing to do about HC is soften it. It robs it of some of its essential brutality.

Some tracks on When Worlds Collide contains “pure” punk, spiked up with tiny sprinklings of hip-hop rhythms, rap and spoken word. The latter shouldn’t be there. Its to slow for The Vendetta. As the album progresses hip-hop takes over, and I find myself more and more lost. Out of my water so to speak.

All things considered the production value and the editing – to say nothing of the composing – puts this album slightly higher on the scale than I would normally deem fair. It’s professionally done, but it’s far too dominated by hip-hop. When worlds collide, one at least expects the worlds in question to be of approximately the same size. Otherwise it’s merely a meteor event. Falling to earth, while burning away.