Brutality And The Beast

One more step motherfucker and you'll see me spit fire
Blood on my hands and you on the floor - spitfire! 

Welcome to Raging Speedhorn Hard To Kill, one of the very best LPs released in 2020, certainly the very best new heavy metal album I’ve heard this year.

Bought on a whim the day after it came out, Hard To Kill is exactly the shot of coruscating, scouring rage I needed to get me through the dark dog-day dregs of 2020. It’s loud and it hurts, beautifully, necessarily.

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Before Hard To Kill I knew RSH from a 7″ single I bought called The Hate Song and from their splinter group Viking Skull*. Now, I’m a fully paid up RSH fan.

What I found so impressive about Hard To Kill is that it just sounds like a group pushed to the end of their endurance, into a corner and ready to fight. RSH musically ain’t taking a single step backwards.

The fray kicks off with the gang chant of ‘Snakebite’, the metal just fizzing around your ears, flashing past at a breakneck speed. I know RSH use two vocalists, but how is that only one drummer making that noise? Gordon Morrison is absolutely phenomenal, frighteningly good.

‘Doom Machine’ adds some serious swing into the mix, slowing everything down a notch to great effect without losing a sliver of heaviness. The double vocals are superb here, I really wouldn’t want to wake up with either chap’s throat the day after recording this though. There’s even a slightly eastern touch to the guitar sound, before the twin guitars even go a bit Maiden for a second or two.

1537 fave fight song ‘Spitfire’ hits us up next adding a touch of RATM into the sound, it’s utterly brilliant, exactly the kind of belligerent I hide deep down inside my mild-mannered exterior. Listening to this makes me feel like I am 9 foot tall and made of gleaming metal sporting fists studded with diamonds^.

The title track could actually be a (much) more aggressive Clutch tune, in the music department not the vocals, and that is a real compliment as far as I am concerned. I really was not expecting so much swing and groove on the LP and it works, wonderfully.

Side 2 opens with ‘Hammerdown’ and trades pace for menace, RSH actually sound venomous on this one; seriously you wouldn’t recover from a bite. ‘Hand Of God’ is one of only two tracks here that don’t thrill me, the band just seem to slightly miss a gear on this one and the closing T-Rex cover^^.

Far more to my tastes are ‘Brutality’ and ‘The Beast’ – now there’s an idea for a Disney title, if ever I had one! Maybe I’m just an anger junkie but I really like my RSH barrelling down the track and ANGRY. Both tunes deliver this in spades, ‘The Beast’ is another slower tune but has some excellent guitar melodies around the edges and goes all chuggy towards the end, which I love.

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I have played Hard To Kill an unfeasible number of times, bearing in mind it only came out at the end of October; it does make a particularly great soundtrack for gaming, I have found. It is cathartic and raging, obviously but I really was surprised how groovy the whole thing is too.

Proper heavy. Now buy it, you wouldn’t want to cross these fellas.

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My phone is playing up, hence the poor photos and I can’t really do justice to the fab multi-coloured vinyl of Hard To Kill here. I do really love the legend carried on the insert sheet, reminds me a lot of Ice-T and his ‘told ya, should’ve killed me last year’ sign out on O.G.

1039 Down.

*their first, brilliant EP featured tracks called ‘Beers, Drugs and Bitches’ and ‘The Wizard’s Sleeve’ and Mrs 1537 kissed the singer when we saw them supporting Young Heart Attack. Those were the days!

^which is good because I am, in fact, a 9 foot tall gleaming metal being with diamond studded fists. True story.

^^which is really well and quite faithfully done. See you in the moshpit Bolan!