Review:
Death metal supergroup Hate Eternal brings musicians from the origins of the genre itself into chaotic darkness by using harmonic principles from metal's past in the context of post-chromatic melodic structuring.
Much like Suffocation, Doug Cerrito's most well-known band, most riffs are atonal and to a rock musician seemingly driven only by rhythm, but like Eric Rutan's Morbid Angel debut, Domination, much of Rutan's soloing fits into a more rock n roll vision of harmony as providing a central space for relativistic elements in composition (key and rhythm) to reference. This frees composition to a very death metal level, and gives to it a sense of bringing harmony into structure which invokes a foray toward the emotionality of jazz.
The effect works well in making death metal with a very adept rock form of solo bring the jazz riffing of most lead guitar into a structural position in the song. Rutan does surprisingly excellent gutteral vocals, plays guitar and writes all the solos. While solos are given large and impressive places in some songs, they are overall used tastefully and efficiently.
Cerrito wrote three songs which display the technical mastery of tempo which Suffocation achieved augmented by a black metal-influenced perception of integrating melody into variable rhythm riffing. His lead playing uses a demanding sense of convergent rhythm and tonal flirtatious to convey a morbid freedom.
Percussion displays a precision that elevates a Mayhem-style running blast into a more exactly played shadowing of compositional intent. Racing basslines essentially build rhythm behind tonal direction and break into a reasonable harmonic use during parts when blasting speed playing isn't required. Both "unknown" members of this band boast experience in technical death metal bands of a locally-known level.
As a whole the album pounds on everything it can find thanks to relentless tempo, highly technical playing and a Slayer-inspired knowledge of when to vary patterns and how to gradually deconstruct them in structural shifts between lucidity and oblivion. No details spared, this creative process refined itself thanks to the great degree of experience and surprisingly, resilient passion, of these weathered death metal warriors.
