Giving their usual blend of dark electro-industrial music cleaner and more clearly-mixed production than usual, Velvet Acid Christ’s work on Maldire feels like a reiteration of earlier works with some minor updating, for the most part.  The staple elements of hissed/growled vocals, drum machine loops, tangled nests of synth-work, and scattered droppings of vocal samples from a wide array of pop cultural sources are all present, and apart from the beats occasionally seeming to draw from hip-hop patterns, there’s just not much in the way of new approaches to be heard.

That said, for an album which essentially feels like the group restating their musical position, it’s put together with solid arrangements, and feels almost as though it’s the result of VAC coming into some new hardware or a bigger budget and wanting to make sure they could still make stuff in line with the old.  Unfortunately, it’s lacking in the madcap energy, unpredictable twists, and sense of depressive misanthropy which so infused those earlier works, while the
lyrics and their delivery feel perfunctory, without spiking into either end of the potential emotional extremes.

Put up against the group’s two-decade musical catalog preceding Maldire, the album ends up feeling like a pale imitation at best, and something of a label-mandated simplification at worst.  Removed from that context, it’s a functional batch of dark electronica with industrial stiffness to its percussive impacts, which only manages to really pick up when it goes fully instrumental (e.g., portions of “HyperCurse” and “Inhale Blood”).  Outside of that and the raspy vocal timbres, there are very few moments which manage to stand as something distinct from a host of similar acts (including a large chunk of Metropolis’ past roster), and it ends up feeling sadly washed-out in spite of the mix clarity.