Darkest Hour – Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation
(Victory 2003)
(Victory 2003)
For the most part, I’m always going to side with speed metal. Or death metal, or black metal, or whatever the fuck adjective gets attached to metal to describe its more traditional path of evolution throughout the ages. The flip side of this is –core music, which can maybe be argued as developing from punk (hardcore, to be exact, but that’s beside the point) but lots of metal gets tagged as shit like horrorcore, mathcore, and other silly names. This metal, I have found, is not usually as good.
Something that has always been a bit of a tug-of-war for me is my slight dislike of metal “wankiness”. Wanking is excessive or inappropriate guitar solo work with an unusual amount of high notes and whammy-bar dives or pinch harmonics or other bullshit. Now, you could hold a seven day metal summit to determine the exact definition of wanking versus normal awesome metal soloing, but for me it’s anything that distracts you from the song or sounds like the dude is showing off. Good guitar players (Dimebag, Brent Hines, Jerry Cantrell, Matt Pike, Glen Tipton/KK Downing, Frank Zappa) understand this concept innately.
Why all the discussion about –core and wanking and shit before I’ve even mentioned this week’s pick, ‘Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation’ by Darkest Hour? Simple, because this album is a prime example of complete lack of wanking and is anything but –core and is therefore fucking awesome. The first couple of Darkest Hour albums, coming to a peak with this one, were super badass metal releases and I don’t know why they don’t get mentioned as such. There is nothing missing on this album: pummeling double-kick, huge hi-gain guitars and “dude, my girlfriend just dumped me for a jazz musician” yelling vocals. I wonder if the dude from Darkest Hour has a normal talking voice, or if he just does that gnarly yell all the time. “PASS THE MUSTARD PLEASE!!!”
That would be metal.
If ‘Hidden Hands’ were a cut of meat, it would be the biggest, gnarliest, leanest cut on the whole cow. Listening to the speed and precision present on this album you are fully aware that either guitarist is capable of wanking at any moment – but they never do. There’s one or two (very tasteful) solos on the whole disc and everything else is sheer metal ass kickery. The only chance you have to catch your breath is during the eight-minute “Accessible Losses” and that’s only right before the song goes critical and sends metal shrapnel everywhere. Metal is the working man’s genre, and it’s that kind of straightforward blue-collar attitude that makes ‘Hidden Hands’ a very honest and very fucking kick ass listen.
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