Dead & Hungry
(Warpath Records)
28:01min
Ok, I gotta admit that I didn’t know shit about these guys. If they already were known in the underground before the release of this album, I didn’t notice them… Oh well, it’s obviously getting more and more difficult to follow the scene these days. Luckily their label included an info sheet, so I can share a couple of facts with you here. HYPOKRAS is a French based act that mainly consists of two members: Deinos – who’s not only writing all the music and lyrics, he’s also performing all instruments except for keyboards and drums (for this debut album they recruited "Sir Genocide" for that) and another guy named Rhikou on vocals. Previously to this full length they did two demos – "Terror 1" in 1998 and a 7 song promotape in February 2001. Lyrically HYPOKRAS is said to be influenced by "gore movies and uncanny writings…" Which finally leads us to the musical aspect, after all. HYPOKRAS play a thrashin’ form of brutal Death Metal, all in all very well produced and musically extremely solid and matured sounding, but with no real identity on its own. Everything sounds pretty good and I hardly find any negative aspects about the album, apart from the fact that there’s already hundreds, if not thousands of bands coming up with something similar. And because of that the album started to bore me rather quickly. Everything just sounded too familiar too me and was heavily lacking in real excitement to keep me interested long enough. If you don’t mind that, give it a listen – it’s certainly not a bad release and you probably may enjoy it more than I did.
Frank Stöver