Hellsaw - 'Cold'

Austrian black metal unit salutes the pioneers of the genre on their latest ode to brutality, Cold.

Hellsaw doesn’t want to challenge you to a bloody game, but at times their abrasive blitzing is enough to cut your ears to ribbons with scant room for escape. Austria’s Hellsaw has more to do with bearing witness to the scorching gates of the underworld likely tolled by the late Quorthon of Bathory, given the random nods of respect passed from one generation to its antecedent on Cold.

One thing that’s truly scary about black metal doesn’t necessarily have to do with satanic lyrics and messages of apocalyptic annihilation, since the earnestness of the genre’s practitioners vary in latitudes. It’s a compulsive devotion to black metal at-large which has become genuinely frightening ever since Dimmu Borgir became the form’s poster children. Of course, the more our conflicted global society falls deeper into despair, the more appealing black metal becomes by attrition.

Though Hellsaw is not quite as stab-you-in-the-gut blasphemous as your standard black metal unit, they’ve taken special measures to make their third album Cold as menacingly glacial as possible while still writing luxuriant tapestries around their ugly thrash lines, unruly beat structures and demonic squelching.

Part of the unstable infatuation with black metal is having a two-minute acoustic intro, as found on this album’s opening track “A Suicide Journey,” which sounds paradoxically romantic before Hellsaw stamps down on the distortion pedals and rams daggers into what has transpired before it.

The saving grace to Hellsaw’s dank cheerlessness comes via subtly-laid guitar weaves in the spirit of Enslaved and Satyricon on “A Suicide Journey,” “The Black Death,” “Subterranean Empire” and “I Saw Hell.” The fact Hellsaw likes to mix up their tricks to accommodate power metal, Goth and trad black metal is the biggest reason Cold works as well as it does. Jigsaw wept…