2001
Ancient Nation/Elegy Records
By: Daedra
Reading previous review of this release, one would expect this to be quite the atmospherical highlight of Hate Forest's career. No matter how much boasting the first review did about how atmospheric this release is, it's just not. I play no favoritism, meaning that this review is entirely unbiased and not for pushing any political stance (Hate Forest plays NSBM) so I'm not going to sau how great this is just to attract more attention to NSBM. This is how the release truly is. Them first song is, well, almost 20 minutes of the wind blowing and the sound of burning. This is so boring that even after a minute it loses its magic. I can see doing the sounds of the wind and the sounds of burning for under a minute, but 20 minutes of it?! Why?! Why have someone sit through that?! Even if you are in the state of being alone and in the dark, 20 minutes of the same shit over and over just really makes you more pissed off than feeling lost in a landscape of desolation. So around 15 minutes of that shit, I was plenty pissed off and said "ENOUGH!" and flipped to track two. I don't think I missed much on track one. Well, track two isn't that great either. What track two pretty much does is have a guitar playing power chords for a great deal of time. The kind of guitar playing you would hear when someone is just warming up on their chords. Yes, it has a melody, but no consistency; just power chords which is typical of Hate Forest. There are also drums during this which, well, blast beat over and over the entire time with absolutely no vocals, no slow movement, no nothing! Than after that you have to endure a short but meaningless sound of a heart beating, fast then slow. Which is exactly how my heart was beating reading the reviews of this release and then listening to the actual thing. This release just really took no talent or creativity whatsoever. Any fool can loop the sounds of winds blowing and fires raging for 20 minutes. And any fool can play power chords for about 10 minutes, program the drums to do the same beat over and over, and finish it off with a heart thumping. I am very disgusted with this. Not because it's the raw Hate Forest everyone expects, but because this is the lazy Hate Forest.