Hell - Human Remains

[Talking Backwards]

I already posted a video of this band in the other thread, but I felt that they deserved a little more exposure. They really are one of those "where the hell did they come from?" kind of bands, that just takes you by suprise.

I grew up on Mercyful Fate/King Diamond, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Crimson Glory (and then obviously later on Sanctuary/Nevermore), etc--you know, when having metal attatched as your genre actually meant something. So I suppose I'm a bit biased towards the classic style where vocals, harmonies, excellent leadwork, solos, the almighty riff and songwriting mattered.

Long story short, they wrote most of their material 25 years ago, but due to countless issues, some of them being tragic, never made a dent or released an album worth remembering. Fast forward to now, and they were finally able to release the album that should have been released around the time 'Don't Break The Oath' was considered "scary" or controversial and they've produced an album that aged just as well as that Mercyful Fate opus. No, I wouldn't say it's an album that's as good as 'Don't Break The Oath' (how many are?), but it's a pretty god damned awesome runner up, and they have an epic song that easily matches 'The Oath' in sheer evilness and atmosphere. I'd probably place it up there with Dante's Inferno (but better), if that song means anything to you.

Just like King Diamond, the vocals will probably be polarizing--but I tend to enjoy theatrical or emotive performances more than those that just dial it in, or those that can only do either cookie monster, or raspy shrieks to cover up for any real vocal talent. Oh yeah, Andy Sneap plays with them and also did the production I believe...so you have that classic sound, without it sounding like it was recorded on an analog 4 track. Find a way to listen to this album and then buy it if you like them.

 

[WhiteBeastofWotan]

Yeah after you posted that video I downloaded the album. Its fucking awesome, the best heavy metal I've heard in a while. Just the perfect amount of riffy and cheesy, and the vocals kick ass. It went over well with some other boarders.

 

[Chromatose]

and then Max told me about it and I agree it is awesome

 

[Talking Backwards]

Who knew Robert Englund could do more than cut people up in their dreams, right?

 

[WhiteBeastofWotan]

I really really want to see this band live.

 

[replicated]

I find the vocalist's face in the first video truly terrifying for some reason.

 

[Brooks]

GASP IT'S A SLIGHTLY AGED HUMAN BEINg KILL IT!!!!

 

[Talking Backwards]

GASP IT'S A SLIGHTLY AGED HUMAN BEINg KILL IT!!!!

Was thinking more along the lines of this:



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[fading]

Pure metal evilness!!!!

 

[Dreadful]

This guy is scarier than Glen Benton used to be. The greatest trick the band Hell ever pulled was convincing the world that they didn't exist.

 

[Shpongled]

As I read your description of the whole thing, I was thinking "pretty sure I'll hate this...", but I wanted to listen anyways because I agree all the way about what you said about when saying you loved metal actually meant anything. Even if you disagreed about how good any certain band was, you were still brothers of metal (fuck I feel old saying this) and fuck everyone and everything else! Now people can hardly even agree on what metal really is anymore and just bitch about what's true and what's not and etc. But I digest...

Played the first video and as expected, I was sort of annoyed by the theatrics and make-up and cheesiness of it all. But if I just scroll down or look away, suddenly it's awesome as shit. The music is really really great and I will most likely buy this and I look forward to blasting it out of my car with the windows down at very high decibals, but the acting is just a bit lame to me. I like it better when bands just rock the fuck out like Metallica did back in the day. If these guys just stood there and headbanged while they played these epic riffs, I'd be so much more stoked.

Either way, the music is awesome.

 

[Dead Winter]

They're a great band but the song didn't do anything for me...it's just kinda bland. I imagine a bunch of 40 and 50-somethings with balding mullets who can't let go of the 80's at a Prog Power concert being into this, but it just didn't do anything for me. That's not an insult, that's just a fact. I'm a balding 30-something who can't let go of the 90's...but then again, the greatest rock and metal with the most integrity came out in the 90's, so we SHOULD pine for it...not much that has been released since can compete with it. Everything just got faster and more extreme.

Vocals were good, but that's all. Just good. There were no awesome wails or air raid sirens, no interesting thing that set them apart from the gazillion other power/prog/classic metal bands who do the exact same thing. The thing they have going for them is all the theatrical stuff. They play really well but the song is totally forgettable and the solos sound cut and pasted from every other classic metal song ever written.

25 years ago they could've possibly done something, but now? I don't think there are enough 40-50 year olds to make them famous, and the younger kids who like power or classic metal are going to flock to the likes of Symphony X, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Blind Guardian, etc. They just don't stand out enough with their music, imo.

 

[Dead Winter]

But that bridge riff IS awesome.

 

[Talking Backwards]

Here's an interesting interview with David Bower, if you're wondering why he seems so over the top. I personally enjoy it myself. Something old is new again and a welcome change from the non stop corpse paint, just for the sake of having white and black makeup on. Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper, Kiss and King Diamond did it first, and it wasn't nearly as much of a parody of itself then as it is now.

http://www.cackblabbath.co.uk/2011/05/26/hell-interview-with-david-bower/

Excerpt:

I taught primary kids for ten years before accidentally getting involved in Am Dram – brother Kev had been asked to put a band together to play for Grease – the Musical by a local MD. I did the job and had such a laugh I joined the (mainly female and pretty!) company…a couple of years later. I was approaching 30 and decided to leave teaching to become an actor. I went to drama school for a year and studied Classical acting, leaving in 1995. Since then I have done most things acting wise – loads of Shakespeare, much of it with Northern Broadsides (multiple award winning NORTHERN theatre company), touring plays, musicals in Europe, actor-musician shows (..I play guitar, mandolins etc,) west end musicals, pantos, a few films, radio plays, most of the tv potboilers from Corrie to Heartbeat, lots of voice stuff – I play Mr Lovebird in kid’s show 3rd and Bird, video games, adverts…oh and I performed at Buck house for the Queen’s 80th bash too. I like to mix things up and refuse to be typecast – Have played Colonel Gadaffi, Tony Blair, Prince Andrew, Kenny McGaskill and Jimmy Hill of late! Have mucked about in various bands over the years but nothing serious till now – have been away from home mostly to be fair, which limits musical outpourings.

I'm a balding 30-something who can't let go of the 90's...but then again, the greatest rock and metal with the most integrity came out in the 90's

Wow...If you want to add a "some" in there, then yeah, but otherwise there was a lot less from the 90's than there were from the 80's for rock and metal as a whole for sure. The 90's were dominated by Gangsta Rap, Grunge and the surge in death metal. No, Pantera was not the saviours of metal, despite the fact that Dimebag had a lot of great riffs. Alice In Chains was the best "heavy metal" from the 90's and then Soundgarden to a lesser extent for hard rock depending on what you would classify them as. Other than that it was a pretty quiet 10 years for the most part as far as the non ultra underground is concerned. Of course I'm not mentioning Nevermore--that's a given.

Also Dead, you can't really base an entire album off of a single song. Bower does actually get some pretty good Sanctuary era falsettos on a couple of songs.

 

[Dead Winter]

Wow...

Morbid Angel
Cannibal Corpse
Death
Nevermore
Pantera
Megadeth
Emperor
Dimmu Borgir
Alice in Chains
Pearl Jam
Soundgarden
Testament
Slayer (Seasons in the Abyss and Divine Intervention were brilliant)
Anthrax (Sound of White Noise kills everything else they've ever done)
Amorphis
Arch Enemy
Biohazard
Opeth
Borknagar
Bruce Dickinson
Cathedral
Cancer
Carcass
Cradle of Filth
Danzig
Fear Factory
Faith No More
Machine Head
Meshuggah
My Dying Bride
Anathema
Paradise Lost
Queensryche (Promised Land)
Skid Row (Slave to the Grind 1990)
Stone Temple Pilots
The Tea Party
Tool
White Zombie
Type O Negative

Should I go on? Are you gonna sit there and tell me cheesy, poofy-haired butt rock and 80's metal was better than all of these bands in the 90's? I whole-heartedly disagree if you are.

Of course I'll check the rest of the album, but I hope it has more to offer than that song. Again, it's not their fault really...it's just good, solid metal. The problem is that everything that we can do in metal has already been done. It takes a really, really good hook or really great solos to catch my attention; sadly, I didn't find either in that song. I'll check out the others, however. The singles are always the worst on the albums.

 

[Captain Beard]

Here goes another Wiener-rant.

 

[Dead Winter]

Go swallow your head, manchild.

 

[Talking Backwards]

Morbid Angel
Cannibal Corpse
Death
Nevermore
Pantera
Megadeth - Rust in Peace is the only reason you can list this band for the 90s.
Emperor
Dimmu Borgir
Alice in Chains
Pearl Jam
Soundgarden
Testament
Slayer (Seasons in the Abyss and Divine Intervention were brilliant)
Anthrax (Sound of White Noise kills everything else they've ever done)
Amorphis
Arch Enemy
Biohazard
Opeth
Borknagar
Bruce Dickinson
Cathedral
Cancer
Carcass
Cradle of Filth
Danzig
Fear Factory - Yeah, a band that had one and a half great albums?
Faith No More
Machine Head - One great album, one decent until 2007.
Meshuggah
My Dying Bride
Anathema
Paradise Lost
Queensryche (Promised Land) - Yeah, because everything from Mindcrime and before didn't smash this?
Skid Row (Slave to the Grind 1990)
Stone Temple Pilots
The Tea Party
Tool
White Zombie - One good album and then they went all dance mix
Type O Negative

Should I go on? Are you gonna sit there and tell me cheesy, poofy-haired butt rock and 80's metal was better than all of these bands in the 90's? I whole-heartedly disagree if you are.

You also listed a whole lot of bands that were already well established and came out during the 80's when most of their contemporaries were just surfacing. The reason a lot of these bands even survived the 90's was because of their previous success during the 80's. Yeah, you listed some bands that released some excellent material during the 90's, but guess what? A lot of them released music that was just as good, if not superior before and after that decade as well.

There were a lot more great hard rock and metal bands in the 70's and 80's, most of which were some of the most influential bands ever--which is why now that the idea well has dried up, people are going back to when bands could actually come up with their own ideas and pretending it's brand new again. Also, both the "black" and "death" genres as a whole were annoying as fuck, and growling or shrieking indecipherably was the worst thing to come out of the 90's. Opeth and a very small minority of bands can actually make that compliment the music instead of simply puking all over it...most of which didn't appear until after the 90's ended. Don't get me wrong, many of those bands produced some amazing displays of technicality or brutality, but the vocals still sucked.

Also, I posted this already when I posted that video the first time in the other thread; It's in no way the best song off the album...not even close. It was just the only one on Youtube that was the studio version. It's probably the second most "mainstream" sounding song off the album.

 

[Dead Winter]

You also listed a whole lot of bands that were already well established and came out during the 80's when most of their contemporaries were just surfacing. The reason a lot of these bands even survived the 90's was because of their previous success during the 80's. Yeah, you listed some bands that released some excellent material during the 90's, but guess what? A lot of them released music that was just as good, if not superior before and after that decade as well.

There were a lot more great hard rock and metal bands in the 70's and 80's, most of which were some of the most influential bands ever--which is why now that the idea well has dried up, people are going back to when bands could actually come up with their own ideas and pretending it's brand new again. Also, both the "black" and "death" genres as a whole were annoying as fuck, and growling or shrieking indecipherably was the worst thing to come out of the 90's. Opeth and a very small minority of bands can actually make that compliment the music instead of simply puking all over it...most of which didn't appear until after the 90's ended. Don't get me wrong, many of those bands produced some amazing displays of technicality or brutality, but the vocals still sucked.

Also, I posted this already when I posted that video the first time in the other thread; It's in no way the best song off the album...not even close. It was just the only one on Youtube that was the studio version. It's probably the second most "mainstream" sounding song off the album.

I didn't say the 90's spawned the best bands (although for a big part of it, they did); I said that the best rock and metal came from the 90's and had the most musical integrity. That argument is ridiculous because Iron Maiden and Judas Priest formed in the 70's but it's not 70's rock. We're talking albums.

Let's look at the bands who did stuff in the 80's:

Anthrax - The only thing that comes close was Persistence of Time and SOWN still owns it.

Alice in Chains - Their first album came out in 1990; unless you're counting when all bands formed (which would be ridiculous), they are exempt. They were spawned in the 90's because their first album came out in the 90's.

Megadeth - Peace Sells is the only thing that can compete with what they did in the 90's, which was Rust in Peace (again 1990), Countdown to Extinction, and Youthanasia

Faith No More - Their best albums were Angel Dust and Album of the Year, both from the 90's

Tool - Best stuff from the 90's

Bruce Dickinson - best stuff from the 90's

Nevermore - I don't have to even mention DNB

Skid Row - STTG was fantastic and beats the crap out of their butt rock they did on the previous album

Obviously you like mainly classic/prog/power metal and classic rock so we're going to have differing opinions on black, doom, and death metal. From my point of view we're both living in the past but you're living even further in the past and resistant to new directions of metal. This debate could go on for days but that's not why we're here.

Of course I have appreciation for 70's and 80's rock and hard rock, but let's face it: it's just dad rock, Guitar World writers with Hendrix, Zep, Wylde, and EVH worship....and I wouldn't exactly say there was a lot of integrity with bands from the 80's. In the 90's the musical spectrum exploded and was much, much more exciting and new with all these bands blazing new trails for others to follow.

 

[Talking Backwards]

Look, I'm not denying that many bands released good material during the 90's, and I also never stated that all of them surfaced during the 90's either--a handful of them would not have survived though if not for already being established during the 80's.

The fact remains that your list is actually pretty damn small and pretty much inconsequential in the grand scheme of things as far as metal is concerned and influential bands and albums go. I find it odd that you're in your 30's and don't already know this. Did you not start listening to music until you were in your early 20's?