Albums

Album Review: Hackneyed

[Album: Death Prevails]
[Label: Nuclear Blast]

This is, without a doubt, one of the most frustrating albums I’ve ever listened to; not because of the music, but the tracklisting. Let me explain… well, try to. Basically, the tracklisting reveals that the first song is on track one, like you’d expect. No problem. From then on, it goes a bit quirky. The second is on track twelve, the third on track twenty-four, then forty four and so on… and as if that wasn’t annoying enough, it’s actually more complicated than that.

Whilst the listing implies the tracks are just spaced out, in practise they’re actually cut up into tiny segments. So when it says the first song starts on track one and the second on track twelve, it actually means the first song is split into tiny bits, and actually fills up tracks 1-10 in seamless, randomly lengthed segments. In a normal CD player, it’s fine, but on a computer it can cause problems. Not all software plays tracks seamlessly; there’s sometimes a short pause between them. And then there are MP3 players. If you’ve got a cheap little one like an iPod Shuffle, you’re screwed – there are only two instances where the whole song is on one track.

My guess is it’s a deliberate move to stop people copying the CD – I was listening to a promo version after all - but it still frustrated the Hell out of me. I never had any idea what song I was listening to, so trying to pick specific songs out as “good” or “bad” is far more work than it needs to be. Trying to repeatedly listen to good bits in songs is all but impossible. I was on the verge of crying after a few attempts.

Anyway, that whinge over, what’s the actual music like? Not bad at all. It’s old-school American flavoured death-metal; pretty fast, evil sounding and full of blast beats and 16th note double kicks. There are some really nice touches on a couple of songs (like the clean section in ‘Gut Candy’… I think, which leads brilliantly into a fierce bridge section), and some surprisingly catchy riffs. This lot have a nice groove too, something that not many death-metal bands manage (Entombed are the obvious exception).

One of the things this album really has in its favour is a bit of a mixed blessing. The members of Hackneyed are young. Seriously young: the average age is 16, and the guitarist is 14. Now, that means they’ve got a loooooong time to develop – most bands put out their best material in their mid-twenties, when the band have been playing together for years. If this lot developed continuously from now until then, even at quite a slow pace, they could produce some really interesting music in the future. At the same time, you can’t judge an album on the potential of the band. Age is irrelevant to a review, because the review is about this record, this moment in time, and not anything that may or may not happen in the years to come (or has happened previously for that matter) - so any naivety and inexperience the band show still counts against the album.

In that respect, this album does sound like it was made by a young band. There are some passages where there’s not much direction, and changes don’t run into each other quite as smoothly as you’d hope. They don’t affect the listening experience all that much, but they are little niggles to the critical ear, and to be fair to them, they sound better than a lot of bands with years behind them. There are some really nice ideas too though – the heavily-phased guitar intro to ‘Ravenous’ and the perfectly subtle synths floating in the chorus of the same song which raise it from big to epic. The nice drumwork is really good too with clever fills and some great variation in the standard beats. The guitarists play some very nice harmonies, like the middle eight in ‘Axe Splatter’. ‘Neon Sun’ offers a nice change of pace mid-way through, and the whole thing is short enough to keep it nice and snappy, and there’s even a neat polyrhythmic part in ‘World’s Collide’.

The recording is solid, and pretty much as you’d expect – the drums are loud and thumpy, the guitars are muchos distorted, yadda yadda. I seem to be saying it a lot at the moment, but I’d like some more variation in the vocals. 30 minutes of death grunting gets a little tiring. The lyrics are tripe (let’s face it, “Ravenous for human flesh” is not all that inspired a line), but then very few death metal bands write anything worth reading. The use of synths is superb; they’re very simple, sit nicely in the mix, and always add something to the song. The outro to ‘Symphony of Death’ is particularly effective.

This CD was a pleasant surprise. There aren’t many death-metal bands I like, and the ones I do are pretty atypical of the scene in general. Fortunately for Hackneyed, they fit into that category too. There’s enough variation and experiments to keep me interested, but they never stretch so far for a sound that they miss it. Like The Arusha Accord (who I reviewed a few weeks ago), this lot could have a pretty big future ahead of them if they keep developing their current sound. This is a good debut that will be getting a few more plays in my house, and, better still, it promises of more to come.

For Fans Of: Entombed, Deicide, Kataklysm

Band Link:
Hackneyed

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