Hellscourge - Hell's Wrath Battalion

Get ready for some raw metal! Brazil's Hellscourge have created a down and dirty record with their debut, 'Hell's Wrath Battalion,' which merges raw black metal, old school death metal, and even bits of 80s thrash. The production value is gritty so don't expect any crystal clean sound where one can tell all the instruments apart from one another. Mostly, fans should expect the guitars to be the loudest and adding a haze to the vocals, drums, and bass, which sometimes will make them hard to hear. Expect basically what one would from a live album (minus the audience) or demo quality. However, that doesn't mean that this album should be passed on as crap. Some tracks like "Blasphemate Him" have that catchy groove feeling that Darkthrone did during their mid-era before they went completely punk. The tremolo pickings are still there and the vocals range from ugly shrieks to rougher spoken word singing; the solos are sparse, but pretty impressive in the thrash sort of way.

Tracks like "Hellscourge" are more in the death metal vein with their aggressive rapid blastbeat mix and slower passages, much like early work from Vader, except this is more black metal than death metal. "Evil Priest Of Hate" is an excellent mix of thrash and old school heavy metal with the catchy riffs, despite repetitiveness, and the vocals actually have some singing qualities to them rather than just the rougher snarls that are prevalent on the album. The vocalist seems like he can reach some pretty good highs with his voice when not in black or death metal mode and still maintain a sort of 'gruffness' to his voice when singing. Overall, the fuzzy quality of the music may tune out everything except for the guitars, which after a while can get kind of repetitive, but this is some pretty old school stuff that much of the general metal listeners may not be used to (with age comes a demand for a slicker sound). Old school metal fans who know of the early 90s black metal, or even maybe 70s metal/ early 80s will surely have an appreciation for the blasphemy that is Hellscourge.

  1. Hell's Wrath Battalion
  2. Blasphemate Him
  3. Sentence Of Destruction
  4. Hellscourge
  5. The SIgn Of Hell Supremacy
  6. Evil Priest Of Hate
  7. God Of Mediocrity
  8. Terrible Revelations

Reviewer: Colin McNamara
Feb 25, 2011
Next review: Aegror - De Morbis

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