Heaven Shall Burn - Deaf To Our Prayers
Century Media
Hardcore / Melodic Death
11 songs (47:47)
Release year: 2006
Heaven Shall Burn, Century Media
Reviewed by Ross
Deaf To Our Prayers sees German Hardcore band Heaven Shall Burn integrate more Euro Melodic Death into their Metalcore material giving them that bit more brutality than you get with other Metalcore bands. This seems to have been a process started with their 2004 album Antigone. Comparing these two albums with their 2002 release Whatever It May Take, is like night and day. Like Antigone, Deaf To Our Prayers is more of a clear and crisp sounding, technical and well planned creation, not a balls out, “Louder, Faster! Make their ears bleed!” explosion of sound normally associated with this genre of music. Even though the sound is clear and crisp, there is still an edge of darkness in there delivered with a boat-load of aggression.

Though steps have been taken in the direction of Melodic Death Metal, Hardcore is still the platform that launches the low end aural assault of the rhythm section through your speakers, like an unleashed junkyard dog. Delivering this attack is Eric Bischoff on Bass and Mathias Voigt on drums. Providing the impressive duelling riffs are guitarists Alexander Dietz and Maik Weichert and vocalist Marcus Bischoff tops it all of with his screams and growls.

There are no clean vocals on this album and Bischoff’s screams and growls can’t be described as singing. His vocal technique seems to be - shout as loud as you can. This makes his voice come out in a monotone stream that your mind, sooner or later, tries to shut out as it gets kinda monotonous. This monotony also creeps in to the bass drumming; Mathias Voigt only seems to have two speeds – Flat-out double kicking or single pedal stomping. He does have the occasional triplet flourish, to add some flair, but these are few and far between. I’m not sure if there was a drummer change between Whatever It May Take and Antigone but if they went back to playing the highly technical drum patterns heard in Whatever It May Take it would be more in synch with the guitaring and elevate Deaf To Our Prayers to a more memorable level of excellence. What cannot be denied though is the awesome guitar work that more than makes up for any vocal and drumming monotony. Throughout the entire album Dietz and Weichert play some of the most amazing guitar widdly-wankery that I’ve heard in a long time. It’s the sort of stuff that lights a fire under the ass of many guitar beginners and gives them a distant goal to aim for.

Counterweight is an excellent start to Deaf To Our Prayers as it is a good benchmark for the rest of the album; the rhythm section bludgeoning the way clear for the duelling guitar riffs and melodic runs carrying along the screaming vocals. This carries on through Trespassing The Shores Of Your World and Profane Believers pulling on the reins ever so slightly for Stay The Course and The Final March which have some pretty powerful riffs and some great guitar harmonies. Of No Avail slows the pace down quite considerably (well slow for Heaven Shall Burn) with a floaty keyboard intro, but this is only a moment’s respite before the bludgeoning vocals return. I think this track and the following Armia would have benefited with some clean vocals in there somewhere, just to go along with some of the more melodic guitaring and change of pace. MyBestFriends.com and Biogenesis (Undo Creation) get back to the job of beating your senses into bloody submission. Dying in Silence adds a twist to the mix with some ‘Industrial’ sampling to set the scene for a more chugging riffed track. Bringing the album to an anthemic climax, The Greatest Gift Of God starts with the chant “False Prophets, False Prophets, False Prophets rule your life!” This is a song that would be the ideal gig finisher; all the fans with their hands in the air, swaying from side to side chanting “False Prophets….” – Emotional stuff people!

With Deaf To Our Prayers, Heaven Shall Burn have shown a consistency in producing powerful and crushingly heavy albums. It is a decent album yet there aren’t really any memorable or outstanding tracks, there aren’t any duffers either, but nothing reaching out the speakers to slap you up side the head. Much of their music also delivers some political message but, because the vocals are screaming yells, it mostly goes right by you un-noticed. Personally, music with message, political or otherwise, is not my bag, I prefer to be entertained, not lectured to. Perhaps Heaven Shall Burn’s insistence on including some sort of message in their songs is keeping them in the ‘Good’ category, instead of the ‘Stuck in your head for a week’ memorable that they could probably achieve, by concentrating too hard on the message they want to get over rather than building on the musicianship; creating two almost identical albums, one after the other, kinda throws a spotlight on this issue The other thing that makes me lack enthusiasm for Deaf To All Our Prayers is the lack of interest shown by the band. At the time of writing, Deaf To All Our Prayers has been on sale for over five months, yet no mention of it is on the band’s website, preferring to use their MySpace account. This, to me, is a strange way of doing things, as you would tend to hunt out their website first before attempting to find them on MySpace.com; I know I did. I know it’s a small thing, but it still gives out an air of ‘Couldn’t be bothered’.
Killing Songs :
Counterweight, MyBestFriends.com, Of No Avail
Ross quoted 70 / 100
Other albums by Heaven Shall Burn that we have reviewed:
Heaven Shall Burn - Iconoclast pt.1 reviewed by Joe and quoted 70 / 100
Heaven Shall Burn - Antigone reviewed by Jason and quoted 74 / 100
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