MGF Reviews With Dead Hands Rising – Expect Hell

Reviews


With Dead Hands Rising – Expect Hell
Mediaskare Records (04/29/08)
Metal

When a band chooses to call its album Expect Hell, what would you expect?

How about the firm slap in the face that is “The Possession.” Indeed, the intense brutality of With Dead Hands Rising’s music married with absolutely horrifying vocals plays out exactly how you’d expect the soundtrack on your journey to hell would sound.

But the band is far from a one-trick pony. There’s this really subtle melody haunting “Beckoning the Glass Cased” that almost goes unnoticed, but once you do, you just shake your head at the brilliance of it all. The same could be said for “Ultima,” where the band keeps sneaking in these moments of melody among the madness of the metal.

The band sounds tight as hell, tearing through each track with a vengeance, drums and bass shake the listener to the core like a depth charge with a dueling guitar attack taking out anything left moving. It can do the up-tempo speed stuff, and slow everything down to a grinding dirge (just listen to the crushing bridges in “A Lurid Account of Murder”).

And the band does a great job of putting together really epic-sounding material, too. Of particular note is “Distress Patterns” and “Tourniquet Girl.” Both songs are simply relentless in their assault, but there’s plenty of tempo-shifting and incorporating of melodic rhythm that, even though each clocks in at just under five- and just over four-minutes respectively, they feel much fuller just from the broad scope of the music. (There’s some really good blasts beats toward the end of “Tourniquet Girl” that you can’t resist headbanging to.) Fantastic stuff all around.

There’s little dead space on here. In fact, the lowest point of the album is the instrumental “Hammer of the Gods,” and even then the only real problem with the track is that it clocks in at under a minute in length. The band can do sick instrumentals when it wants (the slower, melodic “Momentary Alphabetic Convergence” is proof of that, and the group even works a piano into the mix!).

Another huge surprise release on the metal scene this year. A must-listen for fans of brutal metal at its finest.

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Jonathan Widro is the owner and founder of Inside Pulse. Over a decade ago he burst onto the scene with a pro-WCW reporting style that earned him the nickname WCWidro. Check him out on Twitter for mostly inane non sequiturs