Raise Hell

Not Dead Yet (Nuclear Blast)
by Martin Popoff

Loosening their nooses and letting the joculars hamhock forth in sexy swivels and beer swigs, Raise Hell have made a record that begs the rhetorical: “You’ve got to be joking.” Once you realize that they aren’t joking but perhaps are snickering at the question, your desire to party with them and their new ways suddenly leads to inhibition. It’s a formula tapped and then slurped out the bottom of the barrel by Witchery, and now the newly tanked version of The Crown, and it is a formula highly welcome within metal’s increasingly self-serious ranks. The grooves are smashed, the vocals loaded but sneering and leering, and the riffs are dirty metal magic like old Coroner or Kreator, each disembodied, leave-me-alone, teenage element meeting the other guy and then getting in the car for a hell-ride around the newly sodded football field. A mess inside and outside the car by night’s end, maybe even a few regrets, but a couple years down the line into the safety of adult life, a fond memory in the making. Old school pre-school from the second stupider class past ’99’s too-cool new school.
(PO Box 43618 Philadelphia, PA 19106)