ALBUM REVIEW: Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags – Hellripper
Since its formation in 2015, HELLRIPPER has only gone from strength to strength. Establishing a reputation with his trademark blend of blackened speed metal, with notable heavy metal and hard rock touches, the band’s sole member, James McBain, has made this project one of the most compelling and energetic acts within the UK’s underground sound, due in no small part to the band’s intense live shows as much as their brilliant music, and with 2020’s The Affair Of The Poisons gaining McBain and his band some well deserved wider critical acclaim. Their latest, third album, Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags, is another cache of the sort of blackened speed that fans have come to expect from the band, along with a subtle broadening of influences that hints that HELLRIPPER‘s sound may be evolving slightly past its roots.
The Nuckelavee grabs the listener’s attention immediately, with caustic guitar work, punishing drums and howling vocals all creating a rabid sound straight away. As with much of HELLRIPPER‘s best work, it blends classic speed metal with visceral, jarring black metal touches, going straight for the jugular rather than easing listeners in. I, The Deceiver is a huge, rhythmic piece of black ‘n’ roll built around muscular drums and bass and soaring guitars, with vocals that carve through the mix with a hellish howl. It’s an impactful aural assault and a show of imaginative musicianship that stands head and shoulders above the majority of other black ‘n’ roll offerings.
Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags slows to relative crawl, making use of meaty guitars and percussive drums to set a dramatic tone, and coupling this cavernous undercurrent with slick leads and varied vocals. Gathering momentum as it progresses, experimenting with cleaner guitars, throaty backing vocals and haunting bagpipes, it’s an intensely epic offering that takes the band’s sound into interesting musical territories without stripping away its core elements. By contrast, Goat Vomit Nightmare is a short sharp shock of blistering, intricate guitars, frenetic drumming and bestial, shrieking vocals that provides a leaner, punchier version of the style displayed on the first two tracks. It has a heavy metal swagger, resulting in a noxious brew that’s hard not to love.
The Cursed Carrion Crown adopts the preceding track’s formula and makes it even faster and more ferocious, with the razor sharpness of the music and the particularly acerbic, acidic vocals only adding to its effectiveness. The Hissing Marshes is driven by brilliantly chunky, dancing bass lines and darker guitars, again shifting the music stylistically a little outside of blackened thrash and showcasing that HELLRIPPER are just as proficient at creating sombre, atmospheric music as they are at making speed-driven, aggressive numbers. Poison Womb (The Curse of the Witch), a similarly brief burst of confident, adventurous black metal with a solid combination of heavy and speed metal informing it, again makes use of bleaker chords for a brooding and bombastic feel, emotively driving the music in much the same way that its predecessor did.
Mester Stoor Worm serves a similar function to the title track, being a monolithic and dramatic effort which initially begins as a melody-driven, bellicose slab of cacophonous blackened thrash with the sort of virtuosic guitar work that has been present throughout this record, paired with roaring vocals, before incorporating acoustic guitars, sudden tempo changes and gutturals. It presents a twist on the core sound that shows a subtle hint of death metal peppered in amongst the black and thrash. Like the title track, it does a fantastic job of exploring a wider range of influences, but approaches it in a very different manner.
Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags takes everything that made The Affair Of The Poisons such a magnificent record and amplifies it, trimming away the very little fat within the band’s sound and replacing it with a broader mix of influences, from the bagpipes on the title track to the muscular death metal hooks on the album’s closer, and even barked backing vocals that are evocative of punk being added to the mix, with the result being arguably their best record to date. For long time fans of HELLRIPPER, this album still has all the hallmarks that made Coagulating Darkness and especially The Affair Of The Poisons so utterly impressive, from the virtuosic guitar hooks to the energetic, biting undercurrent of the music as a whole. Whether the small components explored within various tracks are adopted into the band’s core sound or not in the future, this is another fantastic album that further cements HELLRIPPER‘s growing legacy, and could take the band to even loftier heights in the near future.
Rating: 9/10
Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags is out now via Peaceville Records.
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