ABSOLUT - Hell's Highest Power
After numerous splits and 7”s, here’s the debut full-length from Montreal’s Absolut and it RIIIIIPS! I feel like an idiot because I let a whole week go by between when this thing arrived in the store and when I listened to it, and a week without Hell’s Highest Power in my life is a week wasted! It’s fitting that one of the splits I mentioned above is with Sweden’s Paranoid, because Absolut seem, along with Paranoid, to be part of a trend of crusty punk bands rediscovering their metal influences (see Paranoid’s covers LP, where they took on metal classics by bands like Sepultura and Celtic Frost). Absolut have done more than just superficially add a guitar solo here and there, though. Hell’s Highest Power is a complex hybrid of crust, death metal, and thrash metal (with a few touches of black metal here and there, particularly on the epic closing track “Last Corpse”), all wrapped up in the magically raw production favored by death and proto-death metal bands like Hellhammer, Master, and Mantas. Indeed, at times Hell’s Highest Powerseems more like a metal record with some heavy crust influences than vice versa, and I’m fine with that because when they’re in “metal mode” Absolut are never cheesy… if they dropped the crust influences entirely I’m pretty sure they would still be the most exciting metal band I’ve heard in years. I’ll leave it there and just say that if you’re a crusty or a metalhead you need to hear this record… highly recommended.
Track List:
SIDE A:
SIDE A:
01. Burnt Hell
02. Sick Pleasure
03. Bastards Reich
04. Hysterias Window
05. Noose
06. Shadows
SIDE B:
01. Devil
02. Systems Cross
03. Survival
04. Killers
05. Savages
06. For Fucking What
07. Last Corpse
02. Sick Pleasure
03. Bastards Reich
04. Hysterias Window
05. Noose
06. Shadows
SIDE B:
01. Devil
02. Systems Cross
03. Survival
04. Killers
05. Savages
06. For Fucking What
07. Last Corpse
List: DBR-039
Format: Tape
Released: 2015
Status: SOLD OUT
Sample:
