The Hitchcocks

Blood Will Follow

Written by: PP on 07/09/2010 06:40:01

The Hitchcocks are one of the more successful punk rock bands in Denmark, having completed several European tours and supported Volbeat on a sold out tour of Denmark a couple of years back. It's the second band of The 20Belows guitarist Kasper K, and the one where he gets to play the part of the lead vocalist of the band. But unlike the pop punkers, the influences of Hitchcocks lie further in history, in two genres that are seldom in the headlines these days: horror-punk, which counts for about 80% of their sound, and rockabilly, which makes brief appearances across their material in the riff department.

"Blood Will Follow" is their debut full length, and it's a much rougher and rawer effort than anything from Kasper's primary band. Clean woo-hoo gang shouts crowd the chorus sections of the album, which should straight away pop into mind a couple of old school Misfits songs, given how they were among the first bands to rely on such compositional structure. I'm sure you'll be able to spot similarities to other horror punk acts like Calabrese and The Crimson Ghosts as well, as long as you are paying attention. And even though this isn't skate punk by any means, you can't avoid the nod towards Pennywise in at least a couple of songs.

A fast tempo and high energy are characteristics of all songs on the album, perhaps even to the point that one's left hoping the band would deviate from the identical pace to give each song a little more of an identity. This is essentially the only problem on "Blood Will Follow", but it's of enough magnitude for the record to feel somewhat inconsistent as a whole. On one hand, you have the harmonic, bright melodies of songs like "Lust For Blood", which reach far into the realm of pop and pop punk to make you sing along, but elsewhere the raw guitar tone becomes a little too anonymous to my liking, content at sounding just swift and nod-alongable (new word, yay!) instead of taking the additional step required for the higher ratings. If you ask me, the band are clearly at their best during the former style songs, "Dead To Me" being another example, where they integrate that last bit of extra melody to the mix and thus elevate the song above the rest. It's a good debut, but I have a feeling they'll grow significantly as songwriters before the next album, so I'll leave some wiggle room for myself in the future.

Download: Lust For Blood, Dead To Me, Space Invaders
For the fans of: Misfits, Calabrese, The Crimson Ghosts
Listen: Myspace

Release date 18.06.2010
Screaming Records

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.