8

Bury The Hatchet - It Was Never Enough

Straight out of the mean, mean streets of Kent (well Chatham to be exact), Bury The Hatchet (not to be confused with the project of the same name by that geezer from the Transplants) deliver some good old fashioned metalcore on this, their second EP. 5 tracks of old-school riffage, rasping vocals and blast beat interludes is the order of the day - and I think we can all agree that will never be a bad thing.

Let's be clear - originality is not that high on the agenda here, clearly - this is quite a retro sounding piece. The EP kicks off with a piano piece I swear I heard on the first Avenged Sevenfold record, but this lot do seem to wear their influences on their sleeves - and mix in a bit of hardcore here and there, plenty of thrash and even the odd, blues scale style Dio riff. The result is something akin to the very oldest Darkest Hour stuff. The emphasis is on immediate impact, rather than subtle guitar layers and lengthy solos.

Track 3, Protest, is probably the stand out track - this lot seem to sound best at their most intense. OK it sounds a whole heap like Trivium - but it sticks in your head pretty quickly, and the production on the record is spot on - which makes all the difference with this kind of stuff.

There is a slight sense of a band still finding their feet here - there is a slight lack of self-identity - but this is about as solid an EP as you're going to get from a band so early into their life. Well worth a listen.