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Heart Attack: Stop pretending

16/10/13 || Pr0nogo

THRASHING MY NEIGHBOURS’ RAGING LOADS DOWN THE WAY DURING 1902’s WASTED GENERATION UNTIL THEY STOP PRETENDING AND FACE THE MUSIC.

One thing I’ll never stop doing, when it comes to reviews, is grab the promo and forget about it for months. It leads to unabashed hilarity when I start attempting to review the album. For instance, Heart Attack – a thrash metal band from Cannes, France – dropped their debut full-length, “Stop Pretending” in 2013, and I was the lucky guy on GD’s staff to receive the promo. Well, it ended up coming in here without metadata, track names, etc., and at the time, Metal Archives was down. That means I was shit out of luck and didn’t know the names of the tracks I was listening to. I had the tracklist somewhere in my email, but that managed to mysteriously disappear, as well. Remember when I said stuff like this was ‘unabashed hilarity’? I meant that it was annoying as fuck. Put your metadata in your fucking promo, people.

Thankfully, the quality of “Stop Pretending” redeems the actions of whoever put this promo together. The vocals you’ll hear on this record range from brash, thrashy screaming to harsh but effective clean singing, and mesh flawlessly with the mixing. The guitars are the stereotypical downtuned riffs that you’ve heard in thrash metal time and time again, mixed with a strangely-effective melodic lead that delivers numerous passages and solos during the album’s forty-six minute running time. The drum fills round out the mix with fast-paced sections that beat your skull in and slower-paced ones that show off the drummer’s skill with his kit, demonstrating a variety not found in most of Heart Attack’s peers. Now, I know what you’re thinking – that’s a nice résumé, Heart Attack, but do you have experience? This might be their debut, but the Frenchmen surely have experience.

The vocals on “Stop Pretending” are powerful enough to lead the charge of a high-octane thrash metal mix, which should tell you all you need to know about the vocalist’s proficiency. His performance on this record shows both power and variety as he delivers crushing growls on tracks like “Face the Music”, only to transition into cleaner singing on tracks like “Sweet Hunting”. The vocalist also manages to keep up – in speed, and in melody – with the mix that backs his voice, and I can’t stress the importance of something like that enough. When you take up the role of being the lead (or sole) vocalist, unless you’re some kind of alternative crust shoegaze punk rapcore outfit, you are making the promise that you can lead the rest of your band’s sound with your vocals. I wonder how many bands exactly keep up with that promise. I’d also like to point out that Heart Attack has better synergy between their harsh and clean vocals than ninety-nine percent of metalcore bands out there, and those in question stand to learn something from “Stop Pretending”.

But that’s not all, folks! Another thing Heart Attack do better than most metalcore bands is related to the ever-popular buzz word when discussing plague metal – breakdowns. There are intelligent uses of breakdowns in metal music – like many other things, they actually do have a purpose – so including them in your songs to just fit a stereotype is probably the worst thing you could do as a metalcore or deathcore outfit. Keep in mind, though, that Heart Attack is a thrash metal band, not a -core one. While I certainly didn’t expect any breakdowns (or any other staples of -core music, for that matter), what I got was a well-executed and tasteful integration of breakdowns into thrash metal songs. It feels very much like their clean singing – you don’t hear it too often, but when you do hear it, it sounds good. To their credit, the metallers from Cannes have pulled out a Costco-sized canne of whoop-ass on their listeners – and fuck you. I’ve been waiting months to make that joke. At least snicker a little.

Let’s finish things up, though, because I doubt many people want to use their eyes at all after reading that lovely pun. You know what time it is? It’s time for drum talk. Now contrary to most thrash metal outfits I listen to from time to time, the drum fills aren’t composed by a brainless moron, but I don’t think it’s just because the drummer for Heart Attack is smarter than a brainless moron. I think it’s because the way they approach their music is different than most thrash bands. I can definitely hear that in the tracks of “Stop Pretending” – you’re looking at a thrash band that isn’t afraid to include clean singing and breakdowns, and this is already after they’ve structured songs with varying tempos and (for the genre) odd instrumentation orders. These fuckers are brave, and it’s to their musical credit that they managed to try all of this ambitious shit and pull it off as well as they did. I’d argue that because of this unorthodox approach to crafting thrash music, the drum tracks by necessity had to be changed from the basic formula of modern or even old-school thrash metal. I don’t think that that’s a bad thing, either, to be honest. I think it’s quite refreshing, so I’ll have to give “Stop Pretending” a powerful score, overall. Kudos, kiddos.

And to think I went through this whole review without making fun of Heart Attack’s choice of song titles. Well, except for the title of the review. That was so much of a burn, you could even say that I… shit canned them.

Listen here.

Information
Released: 2013
Label: Apathia Records
Website: Heart Attack Facebook
Band
Kévin Geyer: guitars, vocals
Chris Cesari: guitars
Flora Capello: bass, cello
Christophe Icard: drums

Tracklist
01. Stop pretending
02. Face the music
03. Sweet hunting
04. Lazarus
05. Raging load
06. Down the way
07. 1902
08. Wasted generation
09. Thrash your neighbour
10. Blackbox

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