HateskoR – Paint My Fear

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Paint My Fear by Hateskor really does kick off well – certainly the Wintersun, Norther and Children of Bodom influences are quite prominent but that isn’t a bad thing. The album starts off with some really good riffing and, despite being a Spanish band, it has a genuinely Finnish melodeath feel to it. Sadly this initial strong start fails to bare fruit, as whilst the album does contain plenty of atypical keyboard and guitar leads as one would expect, it ends up feeling like a bit of a mess. Part of this is the rather arbitrary keyboard melodies that feel out of place during the course of the album, as if the keyboardist just got bored and decided to add in random piano parts, even though they distract from the rest of the song. The real fault is with the band’s vocalist however. His voice simply doesn’t have the raw aggression one wants from a death metal growler, and sounds horribly held back through the course of the album. It also sounds rather low in the mix, overshadowed by the guitar and more so by the keyboard. Perhaps this is all for the best – the vocal lines don’t sit well with the songs themselves, and don’t seem very well thought through. So whilst there’s some great stuff lurking under the surface of this album, as it stands it is very difficult to recommend and doesn’t really work as a whole. That’s a real shame – as there is the makings of a good album here, it just hasn’t been assembled correctly.

Written by James Donovan
More: 2011, Albums, Death Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, HateskoR