With Dead Hands Rising - Expect Hell Review
Posted by Dan Marsicano on 04.30.2008
With Dead Hands Rising returns with their second album, the previous album being 2003's Behind Inquisition. Will the band hit the sophomore slump or come out with a worthy follow up to their debut album?
The Band
Burke VanRaalte-Vocals
Ty Inhofer-Guitar
Logan Branjord-Guitar
Ben Kippley-Bass
Daniel Koppy-Drums
The Track Listing
1. Piles of Burning Bodies-4:22
2. Tourniquet Girl-4:08
3. Hammer of the Gods-.46
4. The Possession-3:35
5. Beckoning the Glass Cased-4:03
6. Ultima-4:11
7. A Lurid Account of Mass Murder-4:34
8. Momentary Alphabetic Convergence-2:56
9. Concentrated Contamination-4:22
10. Distress Patterns-4:58
11. Like Tar-2:37
The Review
Brutal. Relentless. Pummeling. Ruthless.
In my notes for Expect Hell, these four words are all I can see. This is because these words are the only way to describe the album. While it isn’t completely death metal, veering closer to metal core than anything else, much of the album is soaked in death metal influences. Expect Hell is not just an awesome name to an album; it’s what metal fans can expect when you pop in the album into your stereo or your MP3 player.
Repetitive. Monotonous. Lacking emotion. Stale.
These four words were also peppered throughout my notes for Expect Hell. Metal fans have been bombarded with bands that are focused on one thing and one thing alone; brutality. This brutality comes with the sacrifice of musical elements that help to differentiate songs; melody, mood, tone. Bands become short-sighted at their goals to cram our skulls with blast beats way too far up in the mix and vocals that don’t make any sense, except to make people go “Wow, that guy is pissed off.”
So which side is right? Is With Dead Hands Rising a band that could actually leave a mark in a crowded field or are they just pushing the envelope at the cost of fan support and marketability?
There really is no right or wrong answer to this. The best way to look at this is to give two scenarios so you, the reader, can decide if Expect Hell is worth not just your time, but your hard earned money.
If you are the type of person who picks albums based on how cool the artwork looks, if you listen to the same album over and over again without getting bored of it, love death metal growls like they are ice cream sundaes, and go with your close friends to the local metal concert in a small club with bands nobody has ever heard of, not even hardcore metal fans, then Expect Hell is for you.
If you like a little variety in your life, tire of the same old crap over and over again, hate death metal growls like a visit from your mother-in-law on Super Bowl Sunday, and love crazy guitar solos and technical ability, then Expect Hell isn’t for you.
Where does this reviewer lie? Well, you could say in both scenarios. I like death metal growls, local metal shows, and ice cream sundaes. I also like variety, solos, and Super Bowl Sunday. So this makes picking one side or the other a bit more difficult.
As you listen to Expect Hell, you hear a band that is trying to be as “metal” as possible, with a wall of sound just compressing your eardrums from start to finish. It’s not that it’s not entertaining; there are some great musical ideas sprinkled throughout the album. The middle section of the album is the most memorable to me, particularly from “Ultima” to the instrumental “Momentary Alphabetic Convergence.” For these three songs, and the unofficial closing track “Distress Patterns,” the guitarists show a bit of skill and pull out the good old-fashioned galloping riffs ala Iron Maiden and a hint of melody finally comes into play. The songs are still death metal-ish and have VanRaalte barking and screaming his lungs out. For the instrumental, in particular, the track is the softest on the album, with clean and electric guitars interplaying and a catchy, yet subtle, piano track that plays in the background. It’s the only time where any real emotion seems to come out of With Dead Hands Rising.
So these four tracks are really good. The problem with the album, which many will find, is that a lot of the album is geared towards people in the first scenario I mentioned. The lack of variety really starts to come into play by about track five. Every track starts to sound the same, and if it wasn’t for the solid middle section of the album, it would be 40 minutes of sound that seemed to go nowhere. The only track in the first half of the album that had any lasting memory was “Tourniquet Girl,” which had a catchy riff in the chorus and two melodic sections with some lightly played clean electric guitar and a crazy breakdown at the very end.
The rest of the album is largely unmemorable. There are some weird track listing choices as well; “Hammer of the Gods” is a pointless instrumental that has nothing to do with any of the tracks, and the one actual instrumental, “Momentary Alphabetic Convergence,” is stuck near the end of the album, when it sounds like a perfect opening track. The last track, “Like Tar,” ends the album on an uneventful note. It sounds more like filler than anything else, and the album would have benefited from having “Distress Patterns” as the closing track.
Even with all of these problems, there is something enjoyable about the album. The band is all about the riffs, and for the most part, they are fast and to the point. Yeah, it gets repetitive after a while, and some of the songs could have had some time shaved off of them, but the mix of metal core and death metal is an inspired, if unoriginal, choice. With Dead Hands Rising has improved with their new line up and fans of metalcore will be wise to pick this up. Other than hardcore fans of the band, or of metalcore in general, there isn’t any reason to pick Expect Hell up.
The 411: Expect Hell is nothing more than an average deathcore album with some decent use of death metal elements here and there. Even after mulitple listens, there was hardly anything memorable to me. If you love hearing the same song over and over again with the same monotonous vocals and riffs, then pick up Expect Hell and enjoy it. Anybody that enjoys the slightest bit of variety or technicality in their music can stay away from this release.
