HOKEDUN
Succumbing To Decay
(self-financed)
26:43min

British Black Metal is a bit like British cuisine: you don’t hear anyone raving about it. Ever. With the exception of VENOM, the UK is dead territory to me when it comes to Black Metal. I know some ANAAL NATHRAKH, I guess I pretended once that I like CRADLE OF FILTH to impress some chubby or anorectic Goth chick I’m sure, but this is where it ends (on a sidenote: SABBAT were once considered to be Black Metal, and so were ONSLAUGHT, but oh well… I like both, but you do the math.) Enter HOKEDUN, a Black Metal duo from Warwick, Warwickshire… and I already can’t help but giggle. Oh, you limeys with your funny town names! They start their record off with almost a minute of pling-pling entitled ‘Commencement Of Wrath’ – it does commence, yeah, sure, but wrath? Sorry, not really. The wrath then goes right into ‘Overwhelmed By Anguish’, and the anguish here is just in the title. I can almost see these two gentlemen being polite the British way, yes sir, no ma’am, thank you sir, you get the idea. Always gentle and well-mannered and never really rabig or raging. Brutality is missing here, even though the British cuisine is a brutal as a Napalm raid. This record isn’t bad. Fish and Chips ain’t bad either. There’s just… well, to stretch the gastronomic anaogies even further… there’s just no meat on the bone. No salt, no spices, just a meal to fill your stomach. Imagine this: a time machine took you to the year 2036. Machines no longer only sell snacks or soft drinks, but music as well. You have some time to kill, you insert a few coins and pick some Black Metal to kill half an hour. The machine spits out something that tastes like Black Metal, smells like Black Metal… but alas, it’s just a cheap tasteless snack from a machine. Sorry, I do appreciate the effort, but I’d rather have a bloody steak to quench my (transilvanian) hunger. www.facebook.com/hokedun

Thomas Reitmayer

Thomas Reitmayer

Related reviews / interviews:
HOKEDUN - Vanished Away In Tranquillity (Thomas Meyer)

Leave a Reply