Liste der Bands Black Metal Hiems Worship or Die

Hiems means winter in Latin. Yes, well considering this one-man band hails from Italy and that we’re currently suffering a case of global warming, I would think it'd be best to have this called a tropical winter.

Sorry for the bad pun, but I thought Black Metal was all about that cold heinous despair. You know stuff you’d think would be as cold as some Norwegian polar forest or just as hot as the deepest pits of blazing infernos. Worship or Die has neither that hateful coldness nor that fiery furnace of melting metal. To some extent, I even doubt this would qualify as Black Metal.

I certainly don’t want to be more Roman than the Romans themselves, but besides the not so obvious Black Metal vocals, the rest is all mixed feelings. I find more Death Metal elements to Hiems' sound than I was actually expecting. Some tracks seem to even lean on the Death n' Roll side.

The music which is surprisingly well orchestrated from a one-man band displays much groove and catchy moments that I'd rather expected from some Swedish Death Metal band than from any Black Metal band. The guitars have that almost “warm” feeling which in my book is very much in contradiction with the current BM scene.

I found various reviews on the net where people observed similarities with bands like Satyricon or Ad Hominem, but I’d be more prone to say that it resembles more Entombed’s Wolverine Blues or Afflicted's Prodigal Son. There's definitely something Swedish in Hiems’ music except it doesn’t account for the right legacy.

All in all, I can’t really say that it’s anything bad at all. Actually I even found myself enjoying a lot this record and the ultra-groovy eponymous track with its ending organ parts was just, in my honest opinion, the crowning achievement of this very much delectable recording. It’s just I believe that Black Metal die-hard fans, you know “true uber alles” fans, will not find the record meeting quite their expectations. Maybe quite the contrary.

Worship or Die is a daring experiment. A successful one even. If you're ready for new experiences and you're not allergic to innovation, you could very well find it one of the best records released this year in this part of the world. Just forget that this is even labeled as Black Metal, set the volume on 11 and bang your head. Good records go beyond simple labeling, Hiems understood that.