It’s been said on these pages before, but one of the best things about writing on an independent website is coming across bands you may never otherwise hear. For sure we get a lot of music that, for whatever reason, does not do it for us (and generally we prefer not to review than to lumber a hard-working musician with unneeded negativity), but there is something really exciting about coming across a band that is making powerful inroads in the independent world, relying only upon their own skills and ability to make the time (and the money) necessary to write, rehearse and record new music. As a case in point we were approached by Kill the freak, a three-piece death metal band based in Essex in the UK. With influences including Cannibal corpse, Slayer and fear factory, the band clearly suffer no lack of ambition, but with such lofty names on the list, the question is whether the band, producing themselves, could live up to their aims.
The answer, it has to be said, is a resounding yes. Kill the freak have successfully captured a brutally raw sound that has allowed them to draw upon the feel rather than the exact specifications of their heroes and, as a result, ‘666’ is one hell of a powerful EP that delivers upon its promise repeatedly over its brief run time. Opening with ‘slaughter’, a brutal death-infused thrash beast that takes its cues from Slayer and early Sepultura, this is the sort of nasty death metal that would have found a willing audience amongst the tape traders back in the eighties. The production is raw but perfectly effective and there’s no question that Connar Ridd is a capable vocalist and guitarist although the chunkier riffs do occasionally get lost in the mire of distortion. It’s a most impressive opening salvo and ‘SICK’ is no less impressive, the band grinding away like a youthful Cannibal Corpse in a particularly misanthropic frame of mind. Brutal beyond measure, the band handle the raw speed well and sound impressively tight as they tear out their monolithic riffs and blistering solos. ‘My god is the devil’ opens out of a dirty haze of feedback and, insanely, proves to be even faster than the previous two tracks before a deft time change sees the band grind almost to a standstill, the time changes doing a good job of lending even greater power to the fast passages and making Kill the freak sound even heavier. This track is also the first track where the Soulfly influence becomes clearer as the band experiment with structure, delivering a more complex listening experience than the opening tracks. The EP finishes with ‘the wolves attack at night’ which has a slight blackened feel to it. It’s another blisteringly fast track here, but it also feels a little different production-wise, as if the mid-range has been scooped out leaving a vicious wall of treble and forbidding bass (which may well have been the intention) that hits the listener like a dash of ice water to the face. It’s a satisfyingly brutal end to an EP that makes little concession to melody or subtlety.
‘666’ is one hell of an impressive debut. It’s great to hear the UK producing underground metal bands of real quality and the four tracks on offer here point to a band with both ambition and the ability to pull it off. Inevitably production is raw, but in an age where everything is airbrushed (well, studio-brushed) into homogeneity, it’s refreshing to hear the unadulterated sound of a band firing away on all cylinders without worrying about polishing it into blandness. What stands out most is the potential this band offer. Whilst they may be at the start of their career, the potential (given adequate backing and attention) is for Kill the freak to make an impressive dent in the UK underground metal scene. The band will be launching the EP on July 1st and we’ll keep you updated with details as to where to find this impressively unpleasant effort.
