We’ve had a weakness for Seattle’s own Demon Hunter since, well, forever. We can hear you saying, “What the fuck? Weren’t these NCS whackjobs gushing about Rotting Christ just a couple days ago? And isn’t this site called NO CLEAN SINGING?”
Yes and yes, guilty as charged. And to pick a few more polar opposites, we’ve also written about how much we like Living Sacrifice and Gaza. When it comes to metal, we don’t have an ideological litmus test. We listen, and we like or we don’t like. And while we mostly can’t stand clean singing, we’ve said from the beginning that we make allowances for Exceptions to the Rule.
We might be guilty of some local prejudice in Demon Hunter’s case (you can barely make out Puget Sound in the background of that photo above). We might also be influenced by the fact that although Demon Hunter almost never tours, they do play in Seattle from time to time and we’ve seen them on stage a couple times — and they know how to put on a kick-ass live show.
Yes, it’s true that on most Demon Hunter songs, vocalist Ryan Clark mixes clean singing along with harsh, hardcore vocals. But DH’s songs are so damned infectious that we can’t help but be seduced by the music despite the clean singing.
Having said that, what’s got us particularly interested in the band’s forthcoming (March 9) release of its new album, The World Is A Thorn, are a few songs from the new album that have been streaming on the band’s MySpace site that are heavy as shit. (more after the jump, including a brand new video of a particularly infectious new Demon Hunter song . . .)
The title track blasts along at thrash pace and features no clean singing at all. In fact, it includes some very credible death-metal style gutturals. “Tie This Around Your Neck” is another blistering piece of hammering fury guaranteed to get your head banging. And then there’s the song up on MySpace called “Collapsing”. It showcases Demon Hunter’s talent for blending memorable melody with some hard-driving riffs and machine-gun rhythms. It’s already on the candidate list for our second annual year-end run-down of the year’s Ten Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.
Which brings us to the reason for this post: Demon Hunter has now posted a performance video of “Collapsing”. You can watch it here. And you should.
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