Demo 2005

Good for you for checking out this review, because Hellspawn is a band that deserves much more credibility and notoriety than they currently enjoy, all simply because of the power of this incredible little demo. Hopefully my words can push you that much further towards actually purchasing this demo, or the split CD the material is found on. The tape can be had via Ebay from a really good distro, which is where my copy came from.

Anyway, advertising aside (I'm not the one selling the tape), this demo is fucking god-damn awesome. If you aren't familiar with Hellspawn's music at all, basically I think of them as sort of the Polish version of Krisiun, along with another criminally under-appreciated death metal band: Deception. But thats a story for another day. Focusing on Hellspawn, the best description of them would be a combination of Decapitated's "Winds of Creation", Vader's "De Profundis" and demented blasting violence of Morbid Angel's "Formulas Fatal to the Flesh", all put through the hate-filled attack of Krisiun, but imparted with the hauntingly evil and dark melodic and dissonant qualities found in Immolation. It really is a cool combination, and quite refreshing.

Theres lots of lunging blastbeats, but also equally numerous groove-esque sections where the drummer openings up and shows us the facility with which he commands the double bass pedal, especially on the killer opening bits to the first track, "Hypocrisy". When the opening segment of straight double bass under that fucking awesome syncopated 3/4 riff ends and the drummer does the quick little triplet runs on the kicks while doing double-time 8th notes on the snare... oh man, its fucking incredible. Its genious death metal songwriting.

Which is the other main point about this band. Not only do they have the anger and violent feeling, but they know how to effectively write songs, as their riffs swim into and out of really well-thought-out song movements and themes that guide the song gracefully towards their destinations. How they managed to make a love-scorned rhino that just smoked an ounce of methamphetamine dance gracefully is beyond me, but hey... thats what they've done, and its pretty awesome. And all the while, they've concocted awesome riffs that subtley make you realize that they're not in straight 4/4 time, which is all the more awesome because it adds an intelligent element to the music.

Despite these heady the aspects to their sound, Hellspawn keep the structures surprisingly basic and to the point, much like fellow Polish destroyers Deception. There are enough riffs and twists to keep things interesting, but they recognize the power of straight-forwardly bludgeoning your Christian neighbor with a baseball bat, rather than planning months ahead to plant an idea in his mind to make him walk to a certain spot at a given time of day, hopefully wearing a distinctive shirt that you gave him a few years ago in hopes that he might make himself available to be targetted by some other gangster hoods hell-bent on keepin' it realz, yo. Or something else that would sufficiently represent a 49-riff mish-mash of musical segments with no overarching pattern, or cohesion.

"Hypocrisy" may be my favorite still, simply for the impact it had on me when I first played it and heard the opening minute's worth of music. But the other songs are just as incredible. Track 2, "Legion" is a really great track that has a really cool sense of evil melody on the riffing, while still being blunt-forcefully violent and with gobs of sick double bass. Theres a lot of dissonance in this track, which should appeal to those who listen to Behemoth or Belphegor even, while keeping the on-your-toes snare hit patterns that Krisiun and Rebaelliun do so well. Track 3, "Antimary" is a little more straight-forward in its brutality, with more a more classic death metal Vader/Morbid Angel feel, in my opinion, but still keeping the unique sense of musicality that Hellspawn has created for itself. There is even almost a quasi-Suffocation feeling in parts of this song that give a more straight-up brutal feeling, which is a nice break from the style of melody that Hellspawn does well. It helps break up the material and give the songs a distinct identity from one another, something that this band has already succeeded in doing on this, their first ever release.

The guitar solos could be a little more unique, but I'm not faulting them, because they are perfectly suitable representations of Trey Azagthoth's lava contributions to Gateways to Annihilation, an under-appreciated album that followed THE most under-appreciated album of their career. Production-wise, this is pretty fucking awesome. Its got a very crisp, modern production that doesn't ever burden one with the sterile mechanical feel of, say, Krisiun's "Ageless Venomous". The vocals are nice and low, getting down into Craig Pillard ranges, and with a lot of slower drawn out passages. This adds a unique element in my mind, because usually when bands play like this, the vocalist follows suit by spitting out tons of words, much like Steve Tucker on "Chambers of Dis", but here the vocalist choose to go for effectively enunciated and emphasized single-word growls mostly, and its a pretty cool effect.


So, if you like death metal, and like finding underground artists that are actually GOOD, whose music keeps making you come back for more, then Hellspawn is going to suit you just fine. I listen to this tape like, 4 or 5 times a day at least. So, even if your death metal preferences are more in the doomy Incantation to the br00tuHL stomp of Internal Bleeding or the lumbering Texan groove of Blaspherian or the chugging blasphemy of Deicide, or even if you like Immortal and Dimmu Borgir a lot, you'll likely find yourself glad you checked out this band. They deserve it, and this demo is killer. So, I hope you enjoy it as much as I am!