hail of bullets on divine winds

Released: 11 October 2010 Label: Metal Blade

Death metal ‘supergroup’ Hail of Bullets new album sees the band continuing on with their WW2 obsessed old-school European death metal sound. This time around though instead of the grim, bleakness of the Eastern Front the lyrical outlook has switched to the sheer brutality of the Pacific Theatre.

After the stirring intro track finishes with the sampled sounds of Japanese Zero fighters, the band launch into the ferocious Operation Z, named after the Japanese codename for the attack on Pearl Harbor. While it’s not particularly fast by today’s standards of gravity blasted ‘brutal’ death metal it’s still a pacy track and noticeably faster than anything on the band’s debut album. Fans of that album need not be worried though because while there has been a bit more pace injected here and there and the overall sound is just a bit cleaner than ...of Frost and War there’s still plenty of those slow, crunching riffs that are as heavy as a battleship, there’s a good mix of ‘proper’ well thought out lead guitar solos and chaotic, Rick Rozz-esque whammy bar divebombs amongst the riffs to mix things up and vocalist Martin Van Drunen still sounds as though he’s intentionally trying to vomit up his internal organs.

Hail of Bullets don’t try to add anything new to the death metal spectrum, instead they concentrate on doing what was already good about the classic death metal sound as well as they possibly can and I can think of few examples where such outright heaviness has also been as listenable, even catchy, in recent times.  Largely because I’m struggling a bit to explain exactly what marks this album out as something special I’m going to make a bit of an admission here and that’s that I should have actually reviewed this album four months ago when it was first released, in fact slightly before, and yet due to a variety of problems at the time I never did. Sometimes though that little bit of extra time can help, I mean, how often do you love an album on its release, play it to death for a few weeks and then it ends up gathering dust in a drawer because of a lack of replay value? On Divine Winds is different though, you see I did play this album to death when I first got it – and four months down the line I’m probably listening to it even more because they’ve got the mix of aggression, catchiness and sheer good songwriting exactly right for this album and it’s one that every fan of old school death metal should own.

The only question for me is that, having covered the Eastern Front on ...Of Frost And War and the Pacific Conflict with this new album where will the band go next – and will they even stick with WW2 or move on to another conflict? I guess that remains to be seen, in the meantime everyone should just enjoy this album!

by Neil Woodfin