Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Hatenation
Label: SAOL
Release: 2010
Length: 43:28
Rating: 2/5
Hatenation are a band that was born in 2007 on the village outskirts of the multinational, multicultural capital of sport – Barcelona. To be precise – in the little village of Gavà. Of course, from day one until now the band kept filling out, changing and forging itself, chopping the excess parts and excess tissue off the arsenal of the former heavy metal outfit Rebel Pride, and gaining mostly muscle and higher testosterone levels. The key element in the switch to a whole new style of more brutal and, above all, currently very fashionable music was the initiation of a new member – bassist Sting. They tune the strings down to D, add more power and aggression, and rename the band into something more eye-catching – at least that’s what they themselves think: Hatenation is born. After testing the waters in Spanish on last year’s EP recording Afterlife, this July they took over Wheel Sound studio and recorded their fully anglicized debut Blacklist as well. Since money, as is only proper for any debut, is very scarce, they also took on the production and the sculpting of their new image themselves, and the result is …
Honestly, on first listen the result isn’t bad at all. Blacklist is a perfectly solid mix of neo-thrash aggression, death metal and nicely flowing groove rhythm, which at times is too predictable and too obviously goes for the cheap shot. at the same time they also bet on the surprise factor and on the possible fact that you only started listening to this kind of music today, and, well I’ll be damned, the first record that landed in your hands just happened to be Blacklist. Hatenation reach elbow-deep and beyond into the matter of hatred, brutal domination and political collapse and try to squeeze as much out of it all as they can. And the guys are betting on total success only a year after new guitarist Igna Jover joined the band. So let’s move on to an avalanche of, I hope, constructive criticism. That there are quite a few bands adorning themselves with the prefixes Hate and Death, pretty much every sparrow in this wide world has been chirping for ages. I also don’t quite get why you’d have to completely skin the approach of the aforementioned Down and LOG and take their every riff and rhythmic turn as the maxim of everything you’re allowed to do in music? Blacklist is thus a very endearingly played-through set of little songs that would like to sound like …, but the one putting its name under all of it as something fresh and original is a group of musicians who, at best, are known only in Barcelona’s local hinterland, and outside their homeland vanish in an instant into a sea of acts of the very same musical expression, the same names and, even funnier, exactly the same strung-together chords. What also puts a huge dent in the debut is the rather vague and muddy production, in which the main trump card – the guitars – gets lost in a ton of bass and drums, and the vocals sound pretty dry and not punchy enough, too. They’re actually too brittle and weak to convince, and the monotony builds from the first moment of Countdown to the last gasp of N.E.P.. What’s left is eternal lingering in a field of grey and the like. The cherry on top of this rather bland vocal constellation of sounds is the fact that English isn’t their mother tongue, which results in quite a few slips and quite a few unfelt slogans overall. There could be more anger, and would it sound even nicer in Catalan? Or maybe someone should’ve twiddled the knobs on the mixing desk a bit more and added a (kilo)gram or two of overdubbed vocals … The occasional but very stereotypical solos don’t fully convince either, which is why the originally promised erection of the senses stayed at limp-macaroni level. Fuck it, to fully satisfy all appetites an angry penetration of the ear canals isn’t enough, you need something more. I dunno – maybe some foreplay or a heap of something more manly, distinctive and original. There’s also a lot of “groove metal” stomping and stopping practically on the spot, which turns the wild ride down the hit list into more of a routine slog than anything original and profound.
Let me wrap this tangle of veiled praise and criticism up in the last paragraph of this outpouring of feelings by saying that it’s not always easy to shit with someone else’s ass. Hatenation are a (photo)copy of a copy of the original and, in their approach to the LOG or Down ideal, sound closer to Hungary’s Ektomorf, who are decent performers of music written with Max Cavalera’s pen, but on their own cabbage patch radically weed out independent and original ideas. You can’t accuse the youngsters of lacking heart and balls, but it’s not all about forcing out a debut by sheer will and at any cost and then hoping something will hatch out of it all. Sure, even a blind hen finds a grain sometimes, but … The road to oblivion may well continue on the next records, yet I hope and believe that these quite promising musicians will devote a longer period to contemplation, gathering ideas, further selection and, once they have a somewhat fatter pile of cash, hiring some producer who’ll squeeze every drop of heart, anger and musicality out of the big Catalan orange and fold it into a beast that would be more convincing and would next time actually rip our heads off, tear all our ligaments and make mincemeat of all of today’s objections. As they say: the battle has only just begun. The war isn’t lost yet!
This review was created in collaboration with Rock Hard Slovenija and RockLine.
Line-up
Carlos Olmedilla – vocals
Enrique MarÃn a.k.a. Kike – guitar
Igna Jover – guitar
LuÃs Fontes – drums
Juan A. N̼̱ez a.k.a. Sting Рbass
Production
Hatenation
Tracklist
1. Countdown
2. Blacklist
3. Internal Sickness
4. Sons of the Shamed God
5. In the middle of nowhere
6. Unknowledge Fields
7. Pain
8. Dread Sky
9. Traces
10. Visions
11. N.E.P.
