HELL – HUMAN REMAINS
(Nuclear Blast)
(10/10)
EVIL REBORN – LEGENDARY NWOBHM OCCULTISTS RELEASE A LONG-OVERDUE STORMER
“Vile venomous visions infest my dreams,
Foul forthcomings my brains unseem,
The wheel is spinning, spawned is the seed,
Of The Devil incarnate – Evil Extreme!”
Formed way back in 1982, Hell are one of those bands – like MTM favourites Sweet Savage – who’ve proven to have had far broader reaching influence than they ever managed success. Releasing four demos and one EP (1983’s underrated classic Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us) in their original incarnation, they may never have managed the promised 1986 studio album but they did influence everyone from Sabbat to Metallica.
Hell 2011 return with Sabbat’s Andy Sneap replacing the departed Dave Halliday (Sneap’s original guitar master) and David Bower on vocals to re-record a selection of the band’s finest original material. The resultant record plays as a fantastic, storming curio – a vision of metal’s simpler, formative era viewed through the lens of modern production and instrumental technicality. That’s to take nothing from the songs – the likes of On Earth As It Is In Hell and brooding epic Blasphemy And The Master were before their time in terms of concept and technique almost three decades ago and slip comfortably back into the foremost ranks of occult metal today.
Refreshingly though, the band have no evident desire to reinvent themselves. Awesome in the 80s, awesome now; this is a nostalgia trip of the finest kind and a reminder that satanic-themed metal held its finest form in the middle-age between Maiden’s cartoony 666 and the harsh reality of the Norwegian church-burning scene. The visual themes, too, stand out – with both album artwork and the band’s live attire providing a stark reminder to the contemporary scene that metal can have a distinctive aesthetic without pretending to be part of a fashion scene.
A refresher course in all the things that make metal timeless (and awesome) – from the riffs to the solos, the screamed chorus to the spoken interludes, the horns to the fire – this asks real questions of the current crop; could a BMTH or a BFMV drop off the map for almost thirty years and return with appeal undiminished (if not swollen still)?
It’s probably too easy to get overexcited by a band juggling the massive goodwill of a small legion of fans eternally indebted and a collection of awesome, classic songs (The Devil’s Deadly Weapon is a sprawling, earthquaking highlight but the rest of the record could easily interchange with it) that most of them won’t have heard before but – excuse the pun – to hell with that. Human remains is simply fucking awesome.
Hell are back and this time they will be heard.
Sam Law
