Albums That Will F*ck Your Face Off in 2013: Hacride, TBA
Hacride
TBA (Indie Recordings)
Release Date – Early 2013
I’ve realized something about myself over the last few years — I care more about this random French band than pretty much any other. The one thing I don’t know is why. France is now a pretty happenin’ place for heavy music; bands like Gojira, Gorod, Alcest, and Blut Aus Nord are all names that get many a metal head très stoked, but for whatever reason, after two pretty immense records (they’ve had three total, the first being more like an EP), these four dudes from Poitiers are still flying pretty far under the radar. It’s kind of a bummer — no disrespect to the bands listed above, but when it comes to the really mind-blowing, thinking-man’s-metal I love, these guys destroy their fellow countrymen. Hacride don’t play by any rule book, they just create the grooviest, most wild, weight-of-the-world-heavy shit ever.
2007’s Amoeba was my introduction to the group, and I’ve been helplessly hooked ever since. It was around this time that people started really paying attention to groups like Textures, Gojira, Benea Reach, and the like — groups that took the foundation Meshuggah had established and created their own unique vision for the tech n’ groove sound. Hacride’s was unequivocally the most unique. Take spastic chugs, acoustic ebb and flow sections, jazzy solos, and flamenco musicians (?) and you can begin to see that I’m not speaking in hyperbole…
And you thought Ill Niño was Latin metal
Out of all the albums to come out of this world scene, Amoeba is the one I find myself returning to most frequently. And every time I work out to this stuff, I feel like Hercules — Hercules with an incomprehensible French accent (seriously, Samuel Borreau, for all his gritty awesomeness, is pretty hard to understand).
And yet 2009 follow-up, Lazarus, eclipsed Amoeba in every way. The guys must have known djent was on it’s way, because they wisely jumped the tech ship and created a very different beast that was entirely their own. In the footsteps of Burst and The Ocean, Hacride transcended their scene and dropped the sludgiest, Lateral-iest, most wicked album pretty much ever.
Last 65 seconds = you jumpin’ —at 50 bpm!
Hacride do their own thang, and it’s consistently awesome. I’m psyched to hear whatever they do next, because it could pretty well be anything. And that’s a really exciting feeling for a band to create in this day and age, when most of the prog metal elite have resigned to repeating themselves ad infinitum. I’d love to hear Hacride do another quirky collaboration like the one above (a 70’s horn funk metal song would be pretty ace… just sayin’…), but whatever their new approach is, I’m sure it will slay.
