Review by Carl on September 1, 2024.

Heinous (and not Anus, like someone I know actually thought) are a black metal band from my home country, with its most prominent member former Enthroned frontman Sabathan, handling bass duties here. Let me just put it out there, this fucking rocks! There are many, many black metal bands out there, but only a handful of those are capable of composing music as genuinely evil as this.

After an intro that is as ominous as it is awesome, the band strikes out with a dose of varied and especially well-constructed black metal, alternating between fast-paced blackened metal terror and more midtempo stomping parts. Playing is tight throughout and the riffing is way beyond the average black metal standard. Heinous utilizes a more intricate style of playing, going well beyond the Darkthrone-styled offerings of a lot of their colleagues, and in combination with the glorious yet subtle keyboards, the band manages to create an atmosphere I have seldom heard since the first Emperor album. The faster sections of their sound have me at times thinking of the early output of acts like Dark Funeral, Enthroned (no surprise there, I guess), and the more savage moments of a band like Abigor, but don't get me wrong, Heinous is no mere copycat act. As mentioned, there are parts that sound familiar, yet the spin the band gives their music has a face of its own. The best example is the last song before the outro, which must be one of the greatest starts to an extreme metal song in these last 20 or so years. Here, the listener is guided into the track by a choral keyboard drone that is underpinned by a double kick-driven drum, building up tension before the bass comes dropping in, sounding quite like Voivod's Blacky's legendary 'blower' bass. Going on, the band leads the listener into a black metal banger that combines Dissection riffing with Dark Funeral speed, before giving way to an unsettling outro of schizophrenic electronics layered with ranting voices and bellowing roars. Simply sublime, this ending. Equally as sublime is the production, sounding loud, clear, and balanced, without corrupting the essence of the music, maintaining that vicious and dark feeling of unchecked insanity black metal like this is supposed to emanate.

The most remarkable aspect to the band's sound, however, is the roaring, almost psychotic vocals, coming straight from the deepest depths of the dungeon. Drenched in reverb, these give the already solid black metal on offer truly a face of its own. I have seen them live, and take it from me that the guy is on stage equally as terrifying as he sounds, and that is why I'm going to deliver my next point of critique with a bit of a cold feeling enveloping my heart. How great as he sounds on here, by the time I reach the end of the album, the man begins to remind me of a homeless man ranting on a street corner. Once that idea popped up, I could not unhear it. A matter of taste, for sure, but it's a feeling that stuck. Keep in mind though, in the grand scheme here, it's not that big of a problem, especially with music this good.

Despite my point of criticism, anyone who has a pair of ears attached to his or her head cannot deny that this is a massive black metal banger. It seethes darkness, is drenched in an atmosphere I don't hear too often anymore, and sounds utterly impressive, both in sound and in execution. There's no other way around it than to say it like this: absolutely recommended stuff for all in the style!

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Review by Allan on June 19, 2002.

Spawning from members of Behemoth and Damnation, Hell-Born is your typical blackened death metal band. After reforming themselves in the middle of 2000, the band rehearsed intensely for what would be their debut album. As they say, practice makes perfect, but maybe the band should have done it a bit more. But, while “Hellblast” is an album that falls short on many areas, it’s a tolerable (only barely mind you) debut for this trio.

As I said, Hell-Born is a typical black/death metal band. Their music is mainly focused on death metal, while the lyrics of the band lay more in the field of black metal. Most of the ideas used on “Hellblast” are clichéd and have been derived from a derivative from another band. While there are bands that are not original and are good, Hell-Born isn’t one of them. Not only are the unique bands better than these guys, even the not so unique ones are better. Listening to the music you can tell the band strove to be different, but they just weren’t able to pull it off. Their ideas sound like they took work to pull out of themselves, and lots of it. Their composing ability is only mediocre also. The transitions in the music are many times less than decent. Sometimes the band opts to even use transitions and will just drop one idea and move to the next. Thus, the music is choppy and tedious. Hell-Born basically have every end of them frayed.

The album itself has no real defining characteristics. After listening to it, you should be thinking to yourself, “Why did I just waste 46 minutes of my life? I could have gotten all the elements of Hell-Born and more somewhere else and it would have tasted a lot sweeter!” The songs tend to run dry by the end of them, as does the entire album. That has much to do with the fact that half the songs sound like the other half, and you just get lost in the member’s train wreck of thought. The entire album is just a mess of unfinished and/or poorly drawn out ideas.

Bottom Line: Hell-Born have disappointed me with their underdeveloped approach to the scene. They not only failed to be creative and unique, but they failed to even keep their head above the water. This is only their debut, however, so it would not shock me if Hell-Born’s next serving were a much cleaner, and ultimately more well thought out album.

Categorical Rating Breakdown

Musicianship: 3
Atmosphere: 4
Production: 3
Originality: 6
Overall: 4

Rating: 4 out of 10