Label: Base Record Production
Date: April 26th, 2024
After an explosion of privacy on my side and boasting about my connections, it’s time to come back to our little metal trip around the world. I’m not sure if you still remember what country we visited as last one before I decided to speak around about my buddies’ ensembles was Morocco. As I mentioned in the Thrilogy review, there are some Spanish enclaves in Morocco, which means Spain is the only European country whose neighbor-lands is the African one. So, now you probably know the Handle with Hate place of origin, even if in the region where they have the headquarter a lot of people don’t think this is Spain. But let’s leave politics alone and be focused only on music itself! Anyways, I think we’ll stay in the country a little bit longer. Well, I’m sure of that, because I want to present to you at least two more Spanish hordes.
As the first will come a band where four of five members (until 2019 it was all of them) play or played in living legend, even if they, contrary to the one coming from Madrid, have not too many releases. The band I’m talking about now was founded in 1992 in Caustic. The modest number of staff is probably the main reason why, in the best case, only a few of you heard this name earlier. However, Handle with Hate was born in 2017 in Molins de Rei, quite a little (something like twenty-five thousand inhabitants) town located near Barcelona, Catalonia. “Wrath of the Keres” is their second full-length released April 26th by Base Record Production in, as I know, two formats – one of them is modern and one very old school. All the same, we have nine tracks. Well, the first one entitled “Feasting the Carnage” is an intro with a total time of forty-eight seconds, even if we’re able to listen to a little bit of metal music itself. Then guys start to handle hate all around. They serve us very nice tortures for our ears here. Music isn’t in extremely fast tempos; we all know very well and love to hear something like this and it doesn’t matter, we did at least five thousand ensembles playing similarly! Catalonians play just old-school middle tempo death metal with everything the rules say about. You know, brutal, broken riffs, guitar, and a little rarer but at the same time easy to recognize bass, tricks here and there, variable drumming with accurate participation of cymbals and deep growling, also variable as well. I could, and maybe even should, write a little more about that, but I think much better will be if you just check it out by yourselves. It’s available on the oldest portal dedicated to spreading all kinds of videos, so… But I’m somehow more than sure you’ll decide to spend these few bucks on it!
That’s strongly influenced first of all by Swedish style of playing death metal created by groups who released “Left Hand Path”, “Like an Ever Flowing Stream” or “Nothing But Death Remains”, but they’re also quite huge touches of strict American one. Guys add certainly their own characteristic for ensembles coming from the Iberic Peninsula feeling, which makes them sound unique. That’s totally old school creativity where fury, hatred and so on almost materialize and I feel I’m back in the early nineties once again, what I just love! The fact is it was mastered by some legendary Swedish metal scene guy who was leading the mentioned before (indirectly, what’s my habit, of course, but every death metal fan knows very well whose debut was “Nothing…”) from Finspåmg and 1993 created a still existing studio. And a skilled ear is able to catch it without major problems. I mean, every studio and every sound engineer has something that distinguishes them from other ones, leaving their own, inimitable “stamp” on the stuff.
If you call yourself a fan of death metal, then you just must have “Wrath of the Keres” on your shelf or computer (depending on what format you like more)! Ok, that’s everything I wanted to write about this album.
