MetalSucks

Round about the time this site was jocking the wares of avant-garde prog metallers Sikth and Textures, several of you emailed us about the French band Hacride. And as usual, you were right on the money. While Hacride don’t have the frenetic nature of Sikth nor the epic sense of melody of Textures, they do have the technicality and the brutal grooves of both, which naturally just means they all have a common influence in Meshuggah. But theirs is a slower, more raw version of any of the above; in fact, the band I’d most liken Hacride to is Norway’s Benea Reach — punishing, grooving, articulate, deliberate and beautiful all the same. This is Meshuggah strung out on heroin, lounging back in a dirty old armchair with a cigarette burnt to the filter in one hand and the TV remote control in the other.

The band’s got a new album Lazarus coming out on April 20th, and they’ve posted the song “My Enemy” (all 10 minutes of it!) on their MySpace page. Go listen to that shit! It’s some of the best material Hacride have written to date. And if you like it, pre-order the record with a limited edition Hacride t-shirt on Listenable Records’ MySpace.

-VN

January 16th and 17th will be the final shows ever for Norwegian rockers Stonegard. Though they apparently split-up in October 2008 and I’ve known about these Farewell concerts in Oslo for a while, I still can’t shake my disappointment at having such a great act not being able to hold itself together. I’m even more upset that they will most likely be entirely forgotten.

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So a lot of you have been emailing us lately about this band Hacride, a really solid French progressive metal band very much in the Meshuggah / Textures / Benea Reach school. I think they’re pretty F’n cool, even if not entirely original (see also: those bands). Here’s the trippy Aronofsky-esque video for their song “Perturbed.”

-VN

So if you’ve previously traversed these here interweb waters before, chances are you prolly know who our-very-favorite-first-half-of-2008-discovered-math-metal band is; that said, the dudes in Benea Reach are bringing the progressive aggressive strength in a major way as well, Nordic styles…and whoah, look at that — their recently-released album Alleviat, just officially made my top-10 list of 2008!! How thpecial…

The vocal (screaming) style is often Meshuggah-reminiscent (with a throaty hardcore backbone, especially on their 2006 debut album, Monument Bineothan), and there is indeed singing here and there as well, allbeit predominantly ambient and in the background…but the music itself feels a bit more straightforward and organic than the aforementioned Swedish metal maniacs — before you cry boring, let me remind you that while simplistic is almost always a disappointing attribute of a band, simple is most definitely not.

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