Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Coffin Shaker: Hate Eternal - Infernus



So, it’s been kind of a wild summer here at the Coffin. I got married at the end of May; I went on my honeymoon at the start of August. Of course I work, and the time between those great events was occupied by too much working. The result is that I’ve done a pretty poor job of establishing the Coffin and getting the operation running.
                My ultimate goal for this blog is to make room for a number of my personal interests, and so far, I’ve got the action figure part down. But my biggest love in life is, and always has been, music. The Internet has no shortage of music blogs, but now it needs to make room for mine.
                In reality, there will be room here for a couple of different genres of music, but for the most part things will be heavy metal or heavy metal-related. It won’t be all new records, but it will primarily be ones that catch my interest.
                So, I guess let’s give it a try.

Hate Eternal – Infernus

                This may break some rule of blogging, if such things exist, but here’s a little background on why this particular record has been for a few weeks now my choice to kick off the musical component of this blog. I truly love music. I’m sort of a music hoarder, having found in 2010 the marvels of a stable Internet connection and various alleyways for obtaining new music without that new music price tag. I’m sure we’ll get into all of that at some later time, but the immediate point is that over the last few years and thanks to technology, my music ‘collection’ has swollen to an amazing size, as I imagine is fairly normal. Before 2010 I had a huge collection of CDs and physical music, but the ease and convenience of digital music soon caught me. As a result, I’ve discovered tons of great new music and, at the same time but not as a result, I’ve lost track of certain bands I used to follow with at least a moderate interest.
                Hate Eternal is an example of the former. Eric Rutans’ death metal collective was something that I took great notice of in 2002 when King of All Kings was released, and that album is one that I would always recommend to people looking for a good tech-y death metal record. At that time, I was a real big fan of Jared Andersen as well, and then-drummer Derrick Roddy was then still a drummer of a different stripe, unlike in the present day where Derrick Roddy has all but become a style of drummer in death metal. Starting with their debut album Hate Eternal was hailed as something of a super group, right there in the early 2000s when a sticker proclaiming ‘super group’ was enough to garner a fair amount of press in the metal scene and at the record stores. That sticker was often enough to convince a younger me that the album attached to it was worth my money. The winter of 2002 saw King of All Kings in steady rotation, part of the soundtrack to wild and crazy nights.
                Releases after King of All Kings weren’t quite as interesting (or good), and my attention to the band waned. The super group label vanished, as subsequent iterations of the band were filled out by names you may know, but none that you were excited by. I flat out missed Pheonix Amongst the Ashes after the real mess that was Fury & Flames, an album that was difficult to listen to because of a terrible production. Infernus seemed like a good chance to give the band another chance, and I’m pretty happy that I did.
                The opening set of songs, Locust Swarm and The Stygian Deep, remind of all those terrific things about Hate Eternal from 2002: they’re fast, and they’re intense and chaotic. That’s a good, comfortable feeling for me with this band: the early 2000s saw a handful of these hyper-kinetic death metal releases that gave you that feeling of needing to grit your teeth and hold on to something for the first song or two, trying to navigate a salvo of wildness that would eventually subside and allow you to venture further into the music. The frantic pace of this album continues for another track or so before the title track slows things down and establishes a groove, one which reaches an amazing peak at around the three minute mark, ushering in arguably the most interesting three minutes of the entire album. It’s the kind of big shift in the span of the record that makes the album memorable as a whole, the same way Powers that Be came at the end of King of All Kings and presented something different from the rest enough that you sat up and took notice of everything that lead up to it. King of All Kings’ moment came at the end of the record; Infernus’ comes right in the middle, and actually signals a shift for the second half of the album to tap the brakes on the chaos and present a little more variety. The Chosen One returns to the more breakneck pace of the opening tracks, while Zealot, Crusader of War again slows things down, not nearly to the extent that the title track does but more along the lines of what another early 2000s Rutan appearance, Morbid Angel’s Gateways to Annihilation, does, before things pick back up for the final three tracks. The changes are not enough to make anyone laud the band as visionary, but they do offer a change of pace, and for that the album is stronger as a whole.
                Lyrically, Hate Eternal is still on the Morbid Angel/ “Ancient Ones” track. I am a man who does love some Satan in his metal, but it’s never a bad idea to branch out a bit.
                Production wise this album is great, or at least great in the context of my last exposure to the band. Fury & Flames’ muddy production was a real, real problem for me, and I lost interest in the album fairly quickly as a result. Infernus here is about on par with a death metal release from a fairly established band in the year 2015; add in the fact that Rutan himself has some producing credits and as such should know better. I don’t mind an Erik Rutan production job; although, for better or worse, the two that pop immediately to mind are Cannibal Corpse’s Kill and the previously mentioned Hate Eternal mess: Kill I have no problems with.
                Overall Infernus is a good album, with enough to keep me returning to it and, maybe most importantly, having moments where I realize that I want to listen to it again, something that doesn’t happen as often as it used to. I feel kind of bad that I kept referencing other albums or specifically another Hate Eternal album,  but for me that’s far more of a positive in this case than anything else. Infernus, while it keeps bringing up memories of King of All Kings, does not make me want to run back to King of All Kings, but rather makes me want to hit play on Infernus again. Somehow if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.

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