DIE BY DESIGN
Now It Starts to Make Sense
(Mother Should Know)

THIS WILL DESTROY YOU
S/T
(Magic Bullet)

EGYPT
S/T
(Lyderhorn)

BROWN JENKINS
Angel Eyes
(Moribund)

DUB TRIO
Another Sound is Dying
(Ipecac)

HATE ETERNAL
Fury & Flames 

(Metal Blade)

BITCHSLICER
III Lycathropic Fellatio

(Worldeater)

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It has gotta be super tough to be a producer in the competitive world of extreme metal. The competition is super stiff, especially in these days where everyone with a laptop and some proficiency in Guitar Hero can dim himself from a cult black metaller to a self-producing Satanist bedroom artist. As you may have seen in these cybernetic pages, where I have tried to expose the usually overlooked breed of people known as record producers, it usually takes a musician to make a real producer. Enter Erik Rutan, the stone faced leader of Hate Eternal and once main axeman in Ripping Corpse and then Morbid Angel, who has for the past eleven years making ears bleed with its extreme death metal both as a musician and as producer with his very own Mana Studios in St. Petersburg, FL.

Though very much a technical band, Hate Eternal’s angle is so bundled up one may be making a mistake classifying them as a technical death metal band. Their visceral all out attack is absofuckinglutely relentless, and that may just be their claim to the throne and their achilles’ heel.

Fury & Flames is Hate Eternal’s fourth full-length and it follows 2005’s much lauded I, Monarch. Much to Rutan’s credit it also follows a time of turmoil, one in which former bassist Jared Anderson lost his life and drummer Derek Roddy departed for darker pastures. The recruitment of angel faced Jade Simonetto may have been a blessing. And Rutan is certainly resting much trust in him, the production of Fury & Flames places his overwhelming playing way on top, an incessant barrage of double bass drums and agitated skin banging.

Replacing Anderson is Cannibal Corpse’s Alex Webster, and who could ask for a more technical man? They just don’t make four stringers like that anymore.  Rounding out the band is Rutan’s old comrade, ex Ripping Corpse and Dim Mak guitarist Shaune Kelley, who along with Rutan and Webster laids down the most atonal and un-melodic string work you’ve heard since perhaps I, Monarch.  There is a lot of technique here, it is just breathing down in the mix, when the occasional solo pops up (“Bringer of Storms”, for instance) it is sort of a refreshing while of different textures and tones. Because for the most part Hate Eternal spends forty minutes and two seconds making damn sure we totally know how brutal they are. But that’s about it.

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