Review Summary: What should’ve been a blazing palette cleanse ends up being among Hirax’s most underwhelming efforts.
Hirax has never been a high concept band, but there is something of a back to basics feel to their sixth album. Faster Than Death (I’ll take “metal as *** album titles” for $300, Alex) feels like a move away from the longer full-lengths that the band had accrued over the course of the new millennium, invoking memories of 1986’s Hate, Fear, and Power with nine tracks blazing by in twenty-one minutes and a return to a single guitar format. Alas, the execution doesn’t quite have the same enthusiasm it did back then.
While the musicianship carries a certain roughness, it denotes a lacking chemistry rather than any sort of endearing fumbles. The instrumentalists come off rather faceless with often one-dimensional playing that lacks any real character beyond fulfilling a basic template of furious guitars and drums while the vocals are starting to show their age with a less commanding presence and signs of diminishing range. An album like 2004’s The New Age of Terror worked as well as it did because of how it threaded the needle of generational balances so it’s unfortunate to see that it work against them here, especially since the other musicians had all already left the group before this even released.
The songwriting feels similarly one-note as having less personality on board makes these straightforward punches just end up seeming monotonous. I appreciate how “Drowned Bodies” and “Revenant” attempt to break things up, the former boasting a mosh-ready chug reminiscent of Power Trip while the latter has a percussive flavor that could’ve been fit in on something like Assassins of War. The re-recording of Raging Violence’s “Warlord’s Command” is a bit of an odd move, not really affecting the album one way or the other.
Faster Than Death feels like it should be a scorching palette cleanse, especially coming off an eleven-year gap since Hirax’s previous album, but unfortunately ends up among the band’s most underwhelming outings. Their similarly short entries in the past were prone to feeling incomplete due to their brief lengths but that factor is almost merciful here, like they just didn’t have much to work with and got together what they could rather than any sort of sporadic spunkiness. It’s not a horrid release since speed freaks will still likely get what they came here for, but one hopes that their next outing could bring back some of their signature conviction.
