Credits:

Hirax

Description:

Because of the eight song titles scrawled upon its backside, Hirax’s second release, 1986’s Hate, Fear and Power, had many consumers confusing it for a full-length album, but really it was more like a mini-LP, since the band’s unusually brief songs summed up to less than 20 minutes of music. In this, as well as most every other respect, Hate, Fear and Power was a surprise-free continuation of the band’s debut, Raging Violence (this one, a true long-player), and no amount of well-intentioned revisionist history can alter the fact that Hirax were very much a one-trick pony. Not a bad trick, of course: combining speed metal, thrash, and hardcore into an early form of crossover; but one trick nonetheless, which was made all the more polarizing by the love ’em or hate ’em vocals of Katon W. DePena. Here, as in their debut, his relatively accomplished but ultimately repetitive alternating of operatic cries