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Hellmouth

Destroy Everything, Worship Nothing

Written by: PP on 21/01/2009 16:41:08

Hellmouth is one of the latest signings by Ferret Records, and as many bands on their roster usually contain an element that distinguishes the band somehow from their genre colleagues, that's already enough of a reason to check these guys out. Need another reason? How about the fact that Jay Navarro of seminal punk rockers Suicide Machines is fronting the band. Anyway, "Destroy Everything, Worship Nothing" is the group's debut album, and it's a difficult one to describe, so bear with me.

From the get go you're treated to a strange mix of southern groove, hardcore punk, elements from metalcore (breakdowns etc), some straight forward metal and even some thrash. Basically, Hellmouth are trying to fuse all those together into one sound, and they've been moderately successful in that as I can't find any bands to compare them to. While sometimes that is a sign of a masterpiece, here that just means a sound that you can't quite place anywhere and don't easily become friends with in the first place. The record's pretty devastating from start to finish, which is what you'd expect from a band that proclaims to hate the mankind and what it stands for (among other things), but there is the occasional slower piece as well to add some atmosphere into the music.

Still, "Destroy Everything, Worship Nothing" contains the same problem as the latest Every Time I Die record (at least for the undersigned): I just can't get over the coarse but southern-groovy vocals and how they interplay with the instruments. In other words, even after ten or so repeat listens of the record, it still sounds like a huge mess, or rather, a huge punk/hardcore/metal mess. It's easy to see what they guys are trying to do here, but the record is lacking that one ingredient that lifts it away from anonymity - at least on the first half of the album. Starting from the awesome "Dust" and going through the best tracks of the record "Drop Out & Destroy" and "Praying For Plague", the album takes a giant leap forward, which I attribute almost entirely to the replacement of the metal element with a harsh hardcore punk one instead. Cool, eh? The problem is that "Dust" is track 7 on the record, meaning that the majority of people will have given up by this point if they were just starting from the beginning of the record, and for that I can't award the band a higher rating than just above the average.

Download: Dust, Drop Out & Destroy
For the fans of: Suicide Machines, Maylene & The Sons Of Disaster, The Banner
Listen: Myspace

Release date 06.01.2009
Ferret Records