HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: That Within Blood Ill-Tempered – Shai Hulud

“Rest assured, this is sincere, this is true.” No-one could ever accuse SHAI HULUD of doing anything without heart. The Florida-born metalcore outfit had been around for a while before they placed these words at the start of their sophomore full-length That Within Blood Ill-Tempered, devoted as ever to finding hope and catharsis even through their emphasis on despair, hatred and misanthropy. Granted, they were hardly the first – and certainly not the last – to look for that sort of thing in hardcore, and yet few have ever done it with quite as much commitment as SHAI HULUD, nor have the band themselves ever really done it better than they did here.

As with every SHAI HULUD record, That Within Blood Ill-Tempered did not arrive without considerable struggle. Formed in Pompano Beach in 1995, the band had hit the ground running with their influential debut EP A Profound Hatred Of Man and its full-length follow-up Hearts Once Nourished With Hope And Compassion – both released in 1997 on the Revelation subsidiary Crisis Records – but progress towards this sophomore full-length proved slow and frustrating, marked already by the band’s notorious revolving door, and with just a few splits and compilation appearances filling a near six-year gap between full-lengths.

Notable was the loss of vocalist Chad Gilbert – off to pursue pop-punk stardom with NEW FOUND GLORY – as was the fact that the band had relocated to Poughkeepsie, New York to accommodate drummer Chris Cardinal, only for him to leave shortly after. Slowly but surely though, things were taking shape; the band recruited vocalist Gert Van Der Velde from the Netherlands after linking up with him on their first European tour; guitarist and one-time vocalist Matt Fletcher shifted to bass and would go on to become the band’s second longest serving member alongside their permanent guitarist and founder Matt Fox; and eventually drummer Tony Tintari stepped in to record parts written by the outgoing Steve Kleisath.

Still with us? Great. Having confirmed the title of the album in a post on the band’s own website in November 2000 – some two and a half years before it would actually see the light of day – the liner notes for the record assert that it was “eventually and painfully recorded [in] the summer of 2002”. Even considering how long it had taken them to get there, SHAI HULUD weren’t about to rush, with Fox explaining in a 2015 interview with The Aquarian that they “wrote and recorded twice, as a demo version, to make sure we really knew what we were doing because we had so many ideas.”

With the album not released for another year – naturally – it was clear when it finally did arrive that SHAI HULUD had stepped up significantly. Not to disparage a classic, but Hearts Once Nourished… is, by comparison, and by Fox’s own admission, notably less refined than its successor. Where their debut was not a huge leap perhaps from the melodic metallic hardcore of fellow Pompano Beach residents STRONGARM – with whom HULUD have shared multiple members – That Within Blood Ill-Tempered saw them realise a vision entirely their own. The melodic parts are more intricate, more stirring; the songs themselves are generally more complex – more progressive even; but more than any of this it’s the unfiltered emotion that comes pouring through every word and note that makes this record truly special.

A lot of that comes down to the lyrics. As Fox has emphasised in several interviews over the years, above all else the goal for the record was to be “exceptionally pissed” – and it is. Delivered with a level of poeticism most bands could only dream of – some have quite fairly called it pretentious – That Within Blood Ill-Tempered puts forward a dim, defeatist view of humanity, one of mankind as a species without reason or compassion, and of man as the ultimate destroyer. “Could any being verily bask in malevolence? / As if its indifference might pardon it”. Pretentious? Sure, those lyrics are taken from a track that compares humankind to the dragon Smaug; but they’re also typical of the density, the attention to detail, that makes That Within Blood Ill-Tempered worthy of such close inspection.

Crucially, it is only through such inspection that one might glean even just a glimmer of hope from the record. There are some obvious examples like the tracks dedicated to those who inspired the band and their close friends within the scene, but others are more subtle. “Let this be my act of defiance / Let this be my refusal to fit in” screams Van Der Velde in opener Scornful Of The Motives And Virtues Of Others, revealing something of the band’s determination to stand apart from the human race they view with such disdain. That tension is clearer still in Given Flight By Demon’s Wings, which wrestles directly against feelings of anger and hatefulness with lines like “This is not my true nature / I was not born as what I have come to be” and “I am prepared to fight humanity every day for the rest of my life”.

Maybe that’s reading too much into it, but it seems only fair to approach a record of such lofty ambition with at least an attempt at some lofty analysis. The fact is that for an album created with so much darkness at its heart, That Within Blood Ill-Tempered is a work of such passion and sincerity that it does ultimately yield a sense of hope in its listeners. SHAI HULUD have produced quality records at their typically sporadic rate in the two decades since, but this one is surely their most emotive masterpiece. Turning once more to the liner notes, the band wrote “The words and music contained herein intend to evoke emotion, inspire, and entertain. May they serve their purpose…”. Twenty years later, there is no doubt that they still do exactly that.

That Within Blood Ill-Tempered was originally released on May 20th 2003 via Revelation Records.

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