EP Review: VCTMS: Pain Processing II

VCTMS peels back their own armor, piece by piece, with their new EP, Pain Processing II.

VCTMS has always had this way of articulating this sense of emotional unraveling: what happens when revelations quietly surface after being buried under the mental noise. When listening to Pain Processing II, these experiences bleed, breathe, and refuse to look away as the emotional stab wounds puncture through the skin. Atmospheric and multi-textured, Pain Processing II is an intense exploration of when pain stops being a memory and becomes a reason for being.

Pain Processing II doesn’t feel so much like a second chapter as it does a continuation of the wounds that have begun to open up from Pain Processing. The moment that “Twenty/Eight,” “victim/mentality” (featuring Austin Hays of Heavy//Hitter), and “burning bones” (featuring Ben Hoagland of The Extornist) start to viciously cut and bruise the skin, one can feel these songs leaving marks that refuse to heal cleanly. Where the first installment of this story felt like a shock upon its impact, Pain Processing II is the slow, trembling distress of what comes afterward.

Such prolonged twinges of suffering continue to manifest in gravid metallic moments like “bed of nails,” “devils//speak” (featuring Nathan Johnson of Fox Lake), and “trauma/response” (featuring Aaron Matts of Ten56). Trapped in this torturous dance of atmospheric pandemonium, aggravated guitars, panic-driven drums, and a dual vocal cadence of adrenaline-fueled rap and screams, VCTMS is not interested in using pain as a spectacle. Moments like this on the EP want to convey something deeper. It's about pain as a ritualized memory, the ones that keep coming back when the room is silent and all that’s left is the suffocating truth of what still hurts. What’s left is the map of pain back to oneself, a journey that isn’t glamorous but is nonetheless needed to reach some sense of peace, or at the very least, to know where one stands after the damage of the emotional minefield has settled.

Pain Processing II ends with one of the best tracks on the record, “clip my wings” (featuring Juan Guiteraez). One of the most melodic pieces on Pain Processing II, “clip my wings,” from its instrumental and vocal choices to its production, finely caps off an album built on the tense, claustrophobic, and strangely intimate textures that this final track culminates and delivers. This final offering isn’t peace; one can’t even say it's a resolution—it’s the final thoughts that enter someone’s head as they try to talk themselves down from the proverbial edge, and, in many ways, it makes the pain felt in this EP up until its final moments all the more evocative and profound.

Pain Processing II is emotional vertigo sewn into an agitated soundscape and the echoes of someone on the brink of losing whatever reserves of control they possess. A push-and-pull between wanting to break free and wanting to collapse from mental exhaustion, Pain Processing II turns catharsis and self-destruction into something beautiful. That maybe, just maybe, there is something or someone inside still left to save.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M4gKluxDUg