Hatesphere - Serpent Smiles and Killer Eyes
Hatesphere have returned with their new album 'Serpent Smiles and Killer Eyes'. Hatesphere have never been to known to stray beyond the confines of their rather safe Death/Thrash mix, so do they have anything new to say on this new record? Is this an album that can stand on its own, or is it a collection of chug-a-longs made for gigging? What remains to be seen most of all, therefore, is do Hatesphere have the "killer" songs as well eyes?
What we have then is a reasonably solid death/thrash album at first glance. Nice and complex, varied guitar parts and rhythm sections and some genuinely catchy melodies, all you could want is on display. Until you get to the vocals, that is. Metalcore-styled yells and yelps have become very old very fast, and the fact that Hatesphere seem to have decided to go down that route is very irritating as besides this problem, they make genuinely interesting music. What becomes even more insulting, is on tracks such as 'The Slain' we see that they can pull off a deep, rough, almost gargled form of death metal vocals that have a genuine power and pull to them, the fact that they ignore doing this most the time accentuates the weakness of their metalcore vocals, rather than the power of their death metal ones.
This collection of songs is solid, stalwart, strong, but never particularly varied or innovative. Most of all, it seems like a collection of tracks which will be cherry-picked when it comes to Hatesphere's live gigs, where they will work much better than on CD, rather than as a product that can stand alone. Hatesphere haven't reinvented anything with this CD, yet their mixing of different influences, styles and ideas is solid enough that they will perform respectably in the live region, something with their wide variety of supporting slots they have had already attests to.
Overall, whilst Hatesphere's vocals do nothing for me, their musically meanderings and their mix of death and thrash metal is more than competent enough to get my foot tapping. 'Serpent Smiles and Killer Eyes' isn't going to set the metal scene on fire, but it's more than entertaining enough for a good evenings listen and that is good enough for me. Hopefully this indicates better things to come from Hatesphere in the future, and they will make the daunting step into innovation or progression, which will change them from entertaining to good. At the end of the day, it's like there is an amazing heavy death metal band inside Hatesphere just waiting to burst out, and it is all the more irritating that it still hasn't.