Fire, Frost and Hell

You’ll know at least one of the musicians in Hellfrost And Fire, maybe all of them if you pay close attention to death metal. Dave Ingram, from a ton of projects, most significantly Benediction and Bolt Thrower, provides vocals in inimitable style, although I will warn you that his voice definitely does not rank among my favourite in death metal. It’s kind of brutal and fairly deep and his lyrics are nothing to sniff at, coming through clearly on this set of 10 tracks, yet he never seems to apply much emotion or nuance to his delivery, leaving me feeling that his skill is more about punctuation of the music than adding another element.

The musical make-up of Hellfrost And Fire is Travis Ruvo (drums) and Rick DeMusis (guitar, bass), but we all know that the inspiration is coming from at least a few decades back in the ‘90s, near the start of death metal’s journey. Benediction might be a relatively good model for some of the gruff riffing, though this act has not stuck to a single source for all their exploits on the debut album. The sandy chugging that takes up a lot of the time on cuts like ‘Meridian’s Acquisition’ speaks of a love of mid-paced British and Dutch death, not so much frantic upper-tempo stuff or blastbeat crazy rampages. However, the result of the heavy rhythmic tendencies in the grooves is to make sections rather close to Fear Factory’s Soul of a New Machine, which I don’t find to be a particularly pleasant reference. I’ve already said that the vocals lack expression, so to find that the riffs sometimes have that mechanized, blank feel too just turns me off all the more.

Certainly moments arrive when Fire, Frost and Hell slips other ideas between the lines, though these are brief and have little impact on the overall impression. Opening ‘The Lost King and the Heir Apparent’ with clean guitars and a spoken verse works well, while solos in ‘Within and Without the Emperor’s Frontier’, ‘A Crown of Conquest’, and the slightly more diverse ‘Debris Wrought from Winter’ project atmosphere far more than the bulky riffing. I think eventually I came to realize that this style just doesn’t work for me, since the riffing feels repetitive and the guitar tone - while savage and crushing - has more edge than body to it, meaning that the mid-paced parts never groove like I feel they should. Worse, 41 minutes rarely change track, making the first offering from this project just passable.