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Hell:On - Shaman review



Reviewer:
8.0

48 users:
7.73
Band: Hell:On
Album: Shaman
Style: Thrash metal
Release date: May 17, 2024
Guest review by: Cynic Metalhead


01. What Steppes Dream About
02. When The Wild Wind And The Soul Of Fire Meet
03. Tearing Winds Of Innerself
04. Preparation For The Ritual
05. He With The Horse's Head
06. A New Dawn
07. I Am The Path
08. Shaman

Hell:On's latest opus Shaman is its thunderous odyssey, a cacophonous parade that echoes in backwoods of eternity, where primordial and shapeshifting spirits whisper and explore the sounds of graveyards, as well as the wails of modern chaos, reminiscent of the hissing, gibbering horror of Lawrence Krauss’ universe. An incantation of death metal viciousness and tribal mystique, this album isn’t just for your ears; it entreats you into a ritual, a psychic place where flesh and spirit intermingle and bleed back into riffs and rhythms.

The album opens like an ancient invocation, with riffs that ripple like seismic waves through an uncharted desert. The guitars, like a shaman’s ceremonial staff, strike with authority, paving the way to a trance-like state. With songs like “Spirits Of My Land”, it gives you elaborate stories of ancestral memory, tapping into the kind of energy that lights firelight shadows in deserted caverns. The vocalist Alexey Pasko delivers with an intensity that sounds less like singing than summoning. The vocal delivery has a sublime, almost sacramental brutality. On Shaman, the percussion is a heartbeat pounding in every track, like ritual drums thumping beneath a blood-red moon. It feels like the very pulse of the land has been caught, and tamed and made to move in time. The drumming is neither gratuitous nor indulgent; rather, it honors the kinds of themes the album addresses at the primal level, lending weightiness without drowning the complex interplays of other instruments.

The talent that Hell:On has for channeling influences is an art form unto itself. At one point, you hear the grumbling shadow of Gojira; the next, the murmurs of Sepultura’s Roots remind that the record is tribal. Yet Hell:On are something else entirely, carving a space all of their own like shamans of the extreme metal chapel, deftly sidestepping the trappings of pastiche with a vision fresh yet fearsome. The production itself merits an entire hymn of exaltation. There’s an approachability that allows for the complex layering of sound to shine, but it maintains a rawness that grounds the album in its primal preoccupations. Each track sounds like a spell painstakingly mined — vicious, trance-inducing and ruthless. If there’s one criticism, it’s that Shaman requires more than passive listening. It is not background music for a leisurely day; it’s a visceral experience, a reckoning that dares you to leave the easy-breezy world of thumbs up and enter the circle of hellfire.

In Shaman, Hell:On has gifted us not just an album but a rite of passage. This isn’t just a new variety of music — it’s a walk to the edge of the abyss, a purely transcendental experience of sound to invoke, and transform.

Written by Cynic Metalhead | 09.01.2025




Guest review disclaimer:
This is a guest review, which means it does not necessarily represent the point of view of the MS Staff.



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