Hellnation
Your Chaos Days Are Numbered

Scary stuff!!!!

Only Mota understands these guys...where have you gone, Mota? You made me do the review of these plague-ridden...well, what can I say, the Hellnation are a tremendous trio from Kentucky (like bourbon), a real brain squeeze until the mush drips from your nostrils (what a nice thing I've written).

They released this CD in 1998 for the marvelous Sound Pollution, which also takes care of other gentlemen of their caliber like Assuck, Cold World, Destroy (among the fathers of American crust), Spazz (yes, I said SPAAAAAAZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!) etc... An impressive sonic splattering that splashes on the walls, shredding everything at the speed of shrapnel from a grenade that explodes in the kitchen while you're having breakfast and the neurotic screams of Al sending out a desperate and ravenous alarm.

All this in 37 very short, extremely violent, and almost identical tracks (and to think I wanted to indulge in a well-detailed track by track...); however, I must point out that the genre played by Hellnation is not grindcore, although it may slightly resemble it, but fastcore/powerviolence, a genre and movement that emerged in the early '90s in the USA around the seminal Man is the Bastard and which featured fantastic bands as highlighted names: Spazz, Charles Bronson, Capitalist Casualties, Ulcer, and many others, including these wacky and noisy phenomena.

In practice, as for the band’s purely sonic side, it’s an extreme radicalization of good old American hc punk, so there are no six-ton guitars, growling voices, double bass drums, and various consorts...that said, it's logical that I'll have to list grindcore among the genres below because among all the extreme ones it comes closest, but...another thing, for me this is a five-dot album because I'm crazy about this stuff, but I well understand that it can be a bit indigestible.

...ps...I almost forgot a real gem: the 12th track is a cover of "Rock Hard Ride Free" by Judas Priest and here Hellnation, at least for a moment, really get down to playing, fully rendering the fullness of that sound that was so influential, Al's voice, while not being able to match the peaks of the great Rob, K.K. Downing's six-string, behind the skins, axes always held high, etc., etc...in short, in 26 flat seconds of noise, they even rub out the legend of heavy metal.