REVIEW: SERPENT EATER - HYENA

Every once in a while I come across an album/movie/book that I feel was made specifically with me in mind, like the artist(s) crawled into my psyche, observed my absolute favorite things, and crafted something to transform my day from totally mediocre to fist-pumpingly awesome. Hyena, the newest album from Cologne, Germany’s Serpent Eater, is one of those albums that I consider a personal gift.

With an inspired mixture of wasteland sludge and icy, dizzying black metal, Hyena feels like Howl’s excellent Full of Hell LP if it spent its childhood scavenging rancid meat from sewer tunnels in an abandoned factory town. Released from Alerta Antifascista Records, this album is a mean, muscular, metallic beast that somehow sidesteps predictability while still featuring conservatively structured, contagious songs that would watch you for hours from the shadows, just to bite your throat out the moment you start dreaming.

Album opener “Ebola” introduces a mixture of bluesy groove and swirling, psychedelic black metal with demonic dual-vocals. “Last Cold Word” features more snarling, scorched riffs that bathe in the muck dividing Immortal and Dragged Into Sunlight, like black swamp water frozen during the first frost. The guitars capture a sense of gothic dread and still achieve nearly impossible catchiness. “In the Wall” invokes Slayer’s thrashing anger over a rumbling beat that builds to vicious grind, maintaining punk intensity even when injecting some dopesmoking harmonized guitars into the mix. Hyena closes with the dynamic track “Trepanation Nation,” featuring a blizzard of blastbeats and At the Gates riffage with a grimy underbelly of sludgy groove and lumbering explosions of hardcore.

Largely due to their cackling sounds and comedic-relief roles in The Lion King, most people don’t realize hyenas are surprisingly savage animals, and unexpectedly fierce foes that lions battle on a constant basis. It’s not unusual for a pack of hyenas to lure a mother lion away from her young, only to have another sneak in and feast on the babies. Not that Serpent Eater encourage the fervent murder of lion cubs, but it’s a reminder of the necessary cruelty of nature’s order, and right now Serpent Eater can quit relying on snakes for nourishment, because this album proves they’re a formidable predator quickly eating their way up the food chain. Despite some similarities to recent work by I Exist and Vaporizer, Hyena absolutely feels fresh and unique, and shows us what’s possible in extreme music when contrast, tone, mood, texture, and the art of a killer riff are all fully explored.

Check out Hyena, streaming on Bandcamp now, and available for a modest 4 EUR: http://alertaantifascistarecords.bandcamp.com/album/aa95-serpent-eater-hyena-lp

And follow them on Facebook to stay current with all their news:  https://www.facebook.com/SerpentEater

ART: KIM MARRA

 

 

Never underestimate the visual element of music. From Elvis to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Alice Cooper to the horned altar thing Dragged Into Sunlight drags lugs show to show, rock’n’roll has always held the power of intense imagery close. This is one of the reasons I like to feature visual artists on this site. The other: Sense of artistic community. The artists covered may not be metal fans, or even considered “extreme,” but their serious talent can convey the entire spectrum of emotion, from rage and loneliness to jubilation. There’s metal for every mood, and that’s a massive part of why I feel there should be more artistic awareness about the diversity of heavy metal music. So while my main goal is to cover a sprawling genre that I adore, there’s a larger mission here, and that’s both introducing curious people to the wonders of metal as well as introducing metal fans to new talent as well.

Today I’m proud to present work from Kim Marra, a painter, pickleback enthusiast, and prolific pencil-collector based in New York state. Here’s Kim’s artist statement concerning her newest series of paintings:

 

“Through my paintings, I construct environments. I build seemingly possible, yet impossible spaces using elements of architecture and furniture. My environments speak to both dreamlike worlds and industrial landscapes. I use an ordered structure to create the illusion of stability, and skewed perspectives to provoke instability. I use this tension to simultaneously surround and close off, welcome and turn away. My paintings are inspired by architectural spaces that feel inhabitable, yet uneasy. For me these spaces mimic the impossible realities that I work toward. I use bright unnatural colors to further alter the viewers experience within this other world. Through these methods, I agitate a personal and collective sense of safety.”

 

Check out these paintings and tell me you can’t see a sludgy hardcore band using these as an album cover, or some grind band with furious signature changes. You can find more information on her work and contact information on her website here: http://kimberlymarra.wordpress.com/

 

Many thanks to Kim for allowing us to share her work!