Review Summary: Effortlessly melding the heavy with the fast, His Hero Is Gone established itself right from the beginning as a band that meant business.
“Because a patient healed is a customer lost.”
Widely recognized as one of the very influential bands in the heavy punk genre in general, “His Hero Is Gone” did not waste any time to demonstrate why, and that in a bone-crushing manner.
“Fifteen Counts of Arson” serves as nothing less than an impressive first full length reminder of the band’s ferocious nature. Low-end tuned guitars providing haunting melodies, a growling/howling type of vocals that remain distinct among one thousand contenders and provide a cynic channel for all the frustration plus the omnipresent penetrating bass and rabies-infected drumkit all together deliver enough bile and spite to give a pissed-off german Verwaltungsmitarbeiter suffering from a bad headache on a Friday afternoon a hard run for his money. Aka, an unfiltered punch to the stomach on the basis of excellent musicianship.
Lists and ratings can be fun, yet oftentimes they are distracting or even pointless to me. However, on seven out of seven days this pure cry of anger about human nature (along with the band’s follow-ups) will find itself on any essential music list of mine. This album in particular and the band in general are one of the very best marriages of the heaviest end of sludge with the spastic hardcore subset.
