Heirborne

Item: Morbid Reality
Author: Daniel Baillod

Morbid Reality

(1990)

Reviewed by Daniel Baillod

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Label independentAdonai Metal Rock #4May 1991

hardcore power metal speed metal thrash metal

Translated from the original French

At last on sale in our markets of gate-crashers after strong emotions, the unmissable suspense cassette!! Each composition is on its own a mini-thriller. Take "Morbid Reality", "Behind Ennemy Lines", "The Terror": what's all that about then? Doubtless somewhere in your daily life where funereal whiffs, sulphurous impulses and inextinguishable anxieties swarm intimately. (the creeps!!!)

Then cast half an eyeball in the direction of "Onward To The Kingdom". The first track grabs you by the collar, since you attend live the arrest of the Perfect Sacrificed One, walking in an unfathomable night. As for the second, it is a sort of killer between death and the sinner, but only the believer, with the victorious sword in his hands, has his chance... The burnt-out skull on the cover is therefore not there for fun, nor to assure a brand image to a band of death metallers of the commonplace stamp... Let it be known, HEIRBORNE is a rather good techno-metal band in the making, and its lyrics are so incisive that its demo bites (!!!).

Indefinable is its style. One might perhaps compare it to a pyramid of prismed metal. At the heart of the edifice, a solid framework of technicity. Then, rods made of an alloy forged in the course of time by the heavenly hand: power / Thrash / Speed (and even hints of acoustic). After that come the windows of the steel mastodon. That is the soloist's voice; it sometimes seems uncontrolled (needs more bolting down, my lad!!) hence a surprising impression of decibels shifting about, but it nevertheless gives a supra-dimensional sensation (the tousled gentleman is indeed capable of wedging it into three interdependent gears: speed (so very high), heavy (hoarseness guaranteed!!), and thrash (it rasps for him!!).

This not-so-strange phenomenon is to be set alongside the feats of TOURNIQUET, where the vocal tightrope-walker ranges over 5 octaves. It is, in a word, just as disarming on every floor of the fortress. The listener, caught up in the role-play, will he choose to embody the good character (the one who arrives at the end, at the heavenly gates) or will he remain for Eternity a hollow wreck stuffed with infernal burning coals, keeping on his poor dried-up tongue a taste of morbid dust...?