Artist: Hatesphere
Title: The Great Bludgeoning
Type: Album
Label: Napalm Records

They don’t piss about, do they, Hatesphere? I make this their 7th full length album since their 2000 self titled debut. When I was offered the list of what albums to review, I jumped at the chance, given that: a) I have a real soft spot for Danish heavy metal (you can blame that on Konkhra), and b) shamefully, I hadn’t ever heard any Hatesphere, but had seen them described on the intratubez as groove-laden death metal.

Which is odd, because although this album does contain an industrial truck load of groovy moments, and one of the best bass sounds in extreme metal, it really doesn’t retain a lot of death metal elements at all. This is proficient, extremely effective modern thrash metal, definitely reminiscent of the best bands from the Swedish resurgence of the late 1990’s. I’m talking of quality stuff – you know, the early Haunted sound, the Carnal Forge school of rabid delivery. Yet for all of Hatesphere’s apparent proficiency with the faster stuff, it’s when they relax a little on the axe-attack that things get, as they say in the ghetto areas of rural Lincolnshire “Real as shit”. “Need to Kill”, for instance, has a slow burning mid to slow tempo stomp that raises the expectation level about 30 kilo-metals before the final pay off of the Exodus on crack riffery at the end. The title track of the album is just as ruthless, with a massive wall of sound in the sledgehammer opening riffs and ferocious drum assault that doesn’t so much foreshadow the upcoming violence of the coming storm, as kicks in the front door of your house and precedes to drop kick you directly in the face. So sure, sometimes I like music that is the equivalent of sitting quietly in the corner of a shadowed little boozer with a paper and a pint of mild gently stroking my beard. Hatesphere has not produced that album. They’ve produced the intense bar-nutter that sits glowering at his pint with an air of palpable menace. This album is the war veteran with the thousand yard stare. You don’t want to spill this pint.

Which is, of course, journalistic hyperbole for saying that this is just the kind of album that you should really expose yourself to. It’s thoroughly modern, of course, in the shiny punchy production. The vocals, are, need I say it, hoarse but decipherable, and the guitars are suitably nasty in a restrained but never the less violent kind of way. You like the old Haunted. You certainly don’t like the new Haunted. You will love this album.

http://www.hatesphere.com

Chris Davison

MTUK HOME