RATS WILL FEAST – Hellhole

vote
5.5

• Bands:
  RATS WILL FEAST
• Duration: 00:30:00
• Available from: 05/17/2024
• Label:

• Time To Kill Records

Streaming not yet available

“Rats Will Feast” is the title of the fifth piece of “Axe To Fall”, one of Converge's best-known albums released in 2009 for Epitaph Records – to be precise, the full title of the piece is “Worms Will Feed/Rats Will Feast”. This information provides us with a primary indication to be able to understand the proposed genre, given that the name is a direct quote from a cornerstone of the most schizophrenic and bizarre metalcore.
Our new album, entitled “Hellhole”, falls precisely into the mathcore subgenre and is therefore in the same vein as metalcore started by groups such as The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Chariot or Norma Jean.
However, unlike the albums of all the projects mentioned so far, “Hellhole” presents itself in a rather anonymous and only apparently chaotic manner: Rats Will Feast certainly demonstrate a certain mastery of their instruments, creating eight songs in which each musician succeeds to show their technical skills and a general tension in search of the extreme, the complex and the absurd in a sonic key; however, in our opinion the result is not very exciting and rather boring: there is no flicker of palpable madness in the complicated music proposed by the Jyväskylä quartet.
This tries to propose a very colorful and varied version of the genre played, moving from the sometimes nu metal riffing of the opener “Penetration” to the psychedelia of “Tourmaline”, or the complexity of “Goodbye John Wayne” – probably the best piece – to the rather melodic and hummable mood of “Replacement”, a post-rock-tinged song at the end of the album. The pieces flow with difficulty while listening to the album and the negative general perception of “Hellhole” often concerns choices of very complex arrangements surrounding main ideas which on the contrary, upon closer inspection, are often banal and even very simple – it is the case for example of the aforementioned “Replacement”.
Rats Will Feast actively try to keep the listener's attention high, proposing a large number of different solutions for the entire duration of “Hellhole” but unfortunately never definitively managing to bring home the result probably desired by those who want to try their hand in such a complex genre: to differentiate yourself from those who offer more captivating music and at the same time still be appreciated and recognized by the target audience.
Also complicit in the difficulty of listening is the production of the album, with rather artificial and uninteresting sounds compared to many other albums of the same genre, which instead are characterized and personal thanks to production choices that are distant from those that are all too often generally taken in an extreme context.
In general it can therefore be stated that Rats Will Feast's latest effort, despite clearly being the result in its entirety of a decidedly novice group, fails to achieve the objective of adorning with amazement the sonic violence that yet a record of extreme music should arouse. Most likely the group will be able to stand out better in a live setting, perhaps the best context for a type of music that on record can actually disappoint and at times be uninvolving.