"vicious tone" is a perfectly correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you want to describe speech that conveys hostility, a lack of respect, or anger. For example, "She spoke to me with a vicious tone, and I felt hurt and embarrassed".
The filmmakers have caught the joyfully vicious tone of the celebrity culture in one of its periodic fits of contempt for an idol it had deliriously created.
You can see why they didn't work on the original album – with the exception of So Young, yet another Jagger lyric about age-inappropriate lust, they don't quite fit with its vicious tone – but they'd make a decent mid-70s Stones record on their own.
The extreme wording and the vicious tone at the NGO conference, inside the hall and in the marching and chanting crowds in the streets, proved too much: four days into the eight-day conference, the United States delegation walked out, followed by the Israelis.
The privately circulated manuscript was authored by three academics at the University of California-Berkeley. Ed and I were stunned by its vicious tone.
The killing of pro-EU lawmaker Jo Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two who was shot and stabbed on a street in her electoral district in northern England a week ago, prompted soul-searching about the vicious tone of the campaign.
And reaching further back, toward the 1960s, Wooden Indian Burial Ground surged through blues-riffing garage psychedelia, with vicious guitar tones and a handmade analog synthesizer, while Twerps offered kindly, strum-along songs proffering friendship and love.
Heine's tone is merrily vicious, but he inserts one note of compassion: had Platen lived in Roman times, "it may be that he would have expressed these feelings more openly, and perhaps have passed for a true poet".
Roderick Weusthof and Billy Bakker both scored hat-tricks, the former setting the tone with a vicious penalty corner flick on nine minutes followed by a sweeping finish for number two.
"I liked the idea of starting off with a vicious joke just to set the tone a little bit," he said.
But when the name-calling turns to very personal, vicious attacks, it can change the tone of the fight.
This singer, born Abel Tesfaye, is one of the most striking stylists in R&B: lewd and vicious in content, tender and desperate in tone.
