HESSIAN
Mánégarmr Review

When I listen to Mánégarmr, the latest from Belgium’s Hessian, I get pulled in by the guitars.  Ostensibly a hardcore group, their playing nonetheless crosses the line into thrash, doom, and occasionally even grind, all thanks to those aforementioned guitars.  They have a tone you’d feel uncomfortable living next door to, that you’d watch from closed blinds, convinced it has a darker secret.  It buzzes, screeches, whines, scrapes, slashes, and even, on very rare occasions, sounds like a guitar.

Mánégarmr is full of all those things that other recent releases on Southern Lord possess: incomprehensible growls, blast-beat drums, bottom-basement production, awesome cover art, lyrics like “SWALLOWING NAILS.”  But it’s that vicious guitar work that sets it apart, moving from full-bodied chords to blackened needling and back again, even throwing in an awesome solo or two for the true metal crowd, like on stand-out “Hollow Eyes.”

The album also maintains an impressive sense of flow, ignoring the crust and grind tradition of 9 or 10 blisteringly fast, one minute songs followed by a penultimate, agonizingly slow closer, in favor of compressing that whole progression into single songs, and sticking the slowest tune, “Father of Light,” right in the middle of the album, chasing it with the ambient “Vãmãcarã.”  Possibly most impressive is “Mother of Light,” which begins on a painfully steady jackhammer rhythm, not all that different from living across the street from a work site, before transitioning into a swirling miasma of shrieks and ghostly industrial guitars, as much Swans as Oathbreaker.

In many ways I am reminded of how, one sweltering summer, a deer got hit by a car and crawled into the woods behind my house to die.  We waited a whole week as it rotted, until the stench became too overwhelming, and we went out back to cover it in lime.  Much like Mánégarmr, it was putrid, sad, and intensely visceral, but nonetheless I can’t shake it.  And in the filthy style Hessian plays, that’s a big compliment.

Southern Lord has been accused lately of flooding the market with too many crusty bands, like Black Breath and Nails, at a rate people both can’t and don’t want to keep up with.  To an extent that’s fair, because SL has put out a lot of crust punk stuff lately, but as in the aforementioned acts, Hessian are all over the map, thrilling and scary and vicious and fun.  And sure, not every act they’ve been releasing is quite up to that quality, but what label bats 1000?  If it results in more records like Mánégarmr getting out there, then I welcome the deluge.