Dark, heavy, fast and aggressive, the first 30 seconds of HOAXBANE's "Messengers of Change" are incredibly promising. Right up until the moment the vocals start... Doing whatever it is they're trying to do.

Some people use screams as an effect in order to give an aggressive edge to a song, or as something that comes between sung sections to add an extra element and level of brutality. Some reviewers use terms like screaming growling and sounding like an animal being simultaneously slaughtered and rectally violated as a good thing. Here, none of those apply. It's impossible to get over for about 90% of the album. What it serves to do is completely detract from what is a fairly heavy and pretty well written record, and then make it borderline unlistenable.  Everything about the vocal style takes the worst parts of the scream/growl style of vocals, and seems to be extrapolated to where it was a joke, the joke was taken too far and now it's just a cruel manifestation of why people who don't like heavy music hate it.

The instrumental parts are forged into an incredibly tight and focused set of tracks, completely crushing and evil sounding and with plenty of differences within them to keep the songs interesting, despite never really slowing down or letting anything that even resembles "mellow" getting in the way. The slower segments are still incredibly dark and evil sounding- creating a sense of unease, rather than seeming to have allowed anything light into the mix.

If you want Black Metal that seems to be trying to be a serious caricature of itself, then here it is. HOAXBANE, I hope, is what the first part of their name suggests- a hoax; having said that, a different vocal style that gives some sort of sense or meaning to the instrumentally pretty brutal and decent songs could make this album listenable.<