Well it’s the 1st of December and half of Britain is already buried under several inches of the white stuff. It may still currently be at the stage of being pretty but I’m much too old for snowball fights (well, unless I’ve drunk enough to chuck them at passing cars for my amusement) and the concept of braving the cold biting at my ears and nose is…well, not at all appealing. A Hat is definitely what the doctor ordered right now, and should come with free matching scarf and gloves…oh come on, really now, call your band Hat and you’re really asking for it. I don’t care what it means in Norwegian – apparently Hate, which is still certainly lacking in the imagination stakes. Ask for this in my local record store and I’d probably get laughed out of the place and told there’s a BHS across the road.
Okay, so they could have put their thinking hats(!) on to come up with a better name, but nevermind – the music does the speaking and with plenty of hatred spewing out of the speakers does exactly what it says on the tin. ‘Inhumanus Revelatio’ brings us in with an atmospheric opening passage quoting from Revelations before blasting in with full on black metal fury. The guitars sound truly menacing and are delivered with the serrated, razor-wired edge that really threatens to tear your eardrums to shreds. It’s all pumped out at a fast pace and has an authentically abhorrent vibe that certainly should warn any posers to keep their distance. I’m often deterred by bands that blast away for the sake of it and while this is pretty full on for the most part, there are some interesting touches to it. Mid-way through the opening track everything breaks away and returns to a foreboding hiss and more of the Revelations are bellowed out.
‘Overmenneske’ really rattles out in a Gorgoroth style fury, at times shifting to a mid-pace that really brings out a dark brooding atmosphere. Musically this is as cold as a snowman’s gonads which somehow seems appropriate; the riffs have that glacial finish to them. ‘Slaves Of Insanity’ swaggers in before speeding off into a furious frostbitten furore. There’s something quite fearsome about the callous raspy vocals here, which are pretty relentless and unchanging. ‘The Flesh I Wear’ makes good use of booming vocals in the introduction, while at times there’s a really cool swagger that almost veers into Kampfarian territory.
At times if I’m being honest things do seem a little repetitive – the vocals certainly don’t allow much room for diversity and there is the tendency for things to race off and leave me behind. ‘The Path To Immortality’ is a nice redeeming track later in the album though which slows the pace a little and gives off a slightly more depressive tone and a great deal of atmosphere, which I feel is lacking in places. The fog horn sound really makes you sit up, and kind of works with the nature of this track well. I really like the intro to ‘Ultimate Evil’ which is spine-tinglingly creepy and could easily be a soundtrack for the gateway to hell opening up (in fact it sounds kind of like a sped-up version of Fabio Frizzi’s ‘Verso L’ignoto’ from The Beyond). I did enjoy this album the first couple of times, but on repeated listens I really felt I had gotten all I could out of it and started to find myself a bit bored with it. While there are some interesting bits to this in places, on the whole I did find things a little too generic and it’s certainly far from the most inspiring black metal album of the year.
http://www.myspace.com/Evighat
