Ultralord try their hardest to be heavier than thou, sometimes it works but other times it comes across as juvenile metal posturing. It’s hard to draw the line between serious metal and the tongue in cheek and with Ultralord the line is blurred.
I enjoyed We Hate You and Hope You Die but I can’t take it seriously. That doesn’t really matter as I don’t think Ultralord set out to make an avant proto giga meta chin stroking metal masterpiece. This is good honest to Satan rocking, as the rotten middle finger in the middle of a pentagram on the cover suggests it would be.
One thing that did annoy me about a lot of the songs is that Ultralord seem incapable of finishing them off properly. Instead they employ the laziest of all recording techniques: the fade out. “Pussy Witch” in particular is a horrid example as the song is weak to start with and the excruciatingly long fade out (well over a minute of fading out!) does it no justice. It smacks of being an unfinished demo. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to come up with an ending for a song and had the band gone the extra few yards these songs would work a lot better. Another source of annoyance is the vocals which go from being mediocre to being pretty awful. On “Blood Sinner” the lyrics are terrible and they’re not helped by the poor delivery. Luckily the music carries the songs and it’s possible to filter out the vocals by concentrating on the playing.
The riffing is all pretty standard, a mix of thrash and sludge. It is fun but not a lot to get my teeth into, a few bands have done it better but equally a lot of bands have done it far worse. From time to time it ventures too far into cheesy nu-metal territory which I could do without. Thankfully the solos are tasteful if unadventurous, although as unadventurous as they are I think they could do with some more thrown in. The world needs more solos in this age of the riff. By far the best part of the music is the drumming. Like everything else on We Hate You and Hope You Die the drumming doesn’t bring anything radical to the art but it is far above competent. Corey Bing pounds the skins like he means it, towards the end of “Don’t Fear the Reefer” he captures some of the raw energy that I’d associate with early Swans, his drumming going exceptionally well with the simple riffing and distorted guitar harmonics. Unfortunately this is another song with a crappy fade out.
We Hate You and Hope You Die adds little to metal as a genre but doesn’t stray too far into cliche. It is almost gratuitously metal but that’s the effect Ultralord are going for. It’s like giving out about Merzbow for being too noisy. It’s a good album for when you can’t decide exactly what you want to listen to as there’s a bit of everything (metal) on it. It could have been a better album if they had a better vocalist but as it stands it’s a listenable if forgettable experience.
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