Hatchet - Dying to Exist



I know I’m supposed to be on “hiatus”/break from this blog, but I have been bumping this Hatchet album for a while and I just wanted to give a few quick thoughts on it. Being one of the few straight-up thrash releases I’ve heard this year, I’d say this one is probably the closest in style and execution to the masterpiece Havok released last year (my #2 that I often wonder about being #1 instead of Code Orange’s Forever). The dizzying Megadeth-esque compositions definitely harken back to that band’s hey-day as well as Havok’s album, and the high-pitched screaming vocal style and the bass-heavy mixing place the album somewhere between Havok and Vektor in those departments. What the album nails with tight performance, flattering production, and definitive style, however doesn’t quite make up for the lack of imaginative songwriting. While the band are certainly capable of making this type of thrash, they seem to fall too deeply into simply emulating the classic style and not putting enough into making a truly unique mark on it like Conformicide. I know I keep referencing Havok, but Conformicide proved what incredible power thrash could still have in the new millennium, and it highlights where this album’s weaknesses lie. While Dying to Exist still has its moments of strength (the closing track’s bass line, the exit of “Desire for Oppression”, and the ferocious blast beats on “Descent into Madness”), it falls flat with a lack of tempo dynamic, repetitive riff styling, and a one-dimensional approach that lead to an overall homogenous sound across its 44 minutes. It’s an enjoyable album, no doubt, one that captures the intended energy quite sufficiently, but one that seems shy, like more of a practice run than an inspired and ambitious exhibition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more