Hell:on – Shaman
“Her Body is an Absolute 10
but Her Face Resembles Willem Dafoe
Pressed Against the Glass in a Hot Greek Bathhouse”
Written by Big Bear Buchko

There is a certain bent brilliance behind listening to chaotic and uncalming music while traveling. While the people around you are plugged into moodscapes and Taylor Swift or trying unsuccessfully to drift into a 36,000-feet-above-sea-level slumber, I am deep in the seventh full-length album by Ukrainian multi-cultural death metal band Hell:on. I am six miles above the earth, flying from one end of the Continental United States to the other, trapped in an airplane and listening to music better suited for the aftermath of a plane going down. I’m just going to keep that little opinion to myself, I think, lest such a joke cause this whole passenger Airbus to be diverted to Des Moines. As hardcore a portrait as a band like Hell:on presents, there can be nothing more hopeless and depraved than the American Midwest, especially in the summertime. This must be avoided at all costs.

Shaman is an interesting album; one that lost me at the beginning but brought me back around the midpoint of the record, which – with only eight full songs – is both only a few tracks in but also still already halfway through. “What Steppes Dream About” is the big opener here, and one that immediately sends me over to Thesaurus.com to find out what the hell is “steppe” is. (I like to know the imagery someone is trying to provoke with a song title, sue me.) But what is a “steppe?” Is it some kind of mythological creature? Some kind of woodnymph, sprite, ethereal demon? That’s my instant go-to in relation to shamans and viking metal and album covers such as this one, which appears to be a kind of ancient shaman/wendigo hybrid. But according to the various interwebs, a “steppe” is “an ecoregion characterized by grassland plains without closed forests except near rivers and lakes.” So, this is… “what grassland plains dream about.” Huh. Well, it’s a… little less metal of an explanation but I’m still on board here. I can dig it. I can get behind the imagery.

“What Steppes Dream About” grabs me early on, with excellently mastered guitars provided by the band’s dueling executer’s squad of Hellion and Anton Vorozhtsov. The drums are tight and flourishing, and the bass backs the unified rhythm of the guitars with low-end precision. I like the Asian and Middle-Eastern influence. It’s different. Dark and mystic. For the first few moments of this record, I feel like Hell:on is going to get as much praise as I can heap into one politely-written, if slightly late, review article. And then the vocals started, and whatever excitement I had about the band suddenly went limp. The vocal style here is one that I hear all-too frequently in concert halls and rough demos, and has yet to impress me even once; it lacks the punch and power of hard-core, but falls below the standard that one might expect from something deathy. It’s almost like diet death metal. Whatever that hard-but-not-quite-hard shit that Morbid Angel used to do, that’s what this sounds like. There was so much to like about this first track – the surprise throat singing, the beautiful industrial punk guitars, and it all went flat with the vocals. I expected something powerful, not something that seemed to lack projection.

I’m disappointed, and moving on into “When the Wild Wind and the Soul of Fire Meet,” I am again met with much of the same. The textures of these songs are wonderful, and the guitars, once more, are amazing. And then the same, strained, generic vocals begin, and I find myself let down a second time. This band is beginning to remind me of a very specific type of girl – where her body is an absolute 10 but her face resembles Willem DaFoe pressed against the glass in a hot Greek bathhouse. So, the question is: Can I paper bag this singer enough to still enjoy the rest of this album? But then, “Tearing Winds of Innerself” and I find that I… don’t…. have to? The vocals seem to have dropped to a lower octave, and materialized with the power, punch, and projection that I’d originally been looking for to begin with. Oh shit, what’s happened here? I say too near a working and worrying flight attendant. I blame my exclamation on CandyCrush, and she accepts my answer enough to pay me no mind, smirk knowingly, and then move on. We have successfully avoided Iowa – for now.

They lost me again with the fourth track – “Preparation for the Ritual,” but this was not as much of a commentary on the band, per say. While I can appreciate the Indian and Asian and Middle Eastern influences, at a certain point, you reach a limit where it seems less ‘pastiche’ and more ‘parody,’ and “Preparation for the Ritual” seems like it runs dangerously close to invoking some stereotypical caricature last popular in the 1950s, like at any moment its going to ask me if I am satisfied with their tech support or maybe tape slant eyes like Mickey Rooney did as “Mr. Yunioshi” in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It’s like, come on, guys, tone it down a bit.

But I am pleased to say that my complaints end there. As… let’s say “complicated” the first half of the album may have been for me, I found the second half perfectly enjoyable. The vocals were strong, the band was tight and effective, the guitars continued to be impressive without being obnoxious; it became something I greatly enjoyed. For me, with my background in the studio and on stage, it seemed as though the band had been on a break before beginning production, so the vocals for the first few efforts weren’t as seasoned as they would be after a few weeks warm-up. It was like their voice and their sound matured as they were working on the record. The voice is an instrument you build up over time.

The final track is the album’s namesake: “Shaman,” and it comes at you with sincere force and theatrical elegance. It plays big and feels like a proper summation of the record before it – the good and the bad. I’d mentioned once in a previous article that title track songs always go one of two ways: the most jaw-droppingly perfect representation of the band (i.e. Slayer “South of Heaven”) or a total garbage throwaway track they attached an interesting name to (i.e. Marilyn Manson “Golden Age of Grotesque”), and I’m relieved here to find that Hell:on’s “Shaman” is emblematic of Shaman as a whole. It is an intricate song that very much feels like the swirling crescendo number from a Broadway musical. I like it, and ultimately, I’m walking away from this impressed once more.

Did you know that Spirit Airlines charges you $4.00 for a warm Sprite?