Hath - All That Was Promised (2022) Metal Album Review Part 1

Just released this year (2022), New Jeresy band Hath's All That Was Promised, delivers the promise of extreme metal, but how good is the metal? Read on to find out. 

The cover art really reminds me of Slayer's 1988 album South of Heaven. Not just the skull, but the whole style. 

Track one, "The Million Violations", begins with a soft intro that sounds like bagpipes before giving way to some nice clean electric guitar picking. By 40 secs the distorted guitar comes crashing in with "Battery" type vibes. But this isn't thrash metal, it is death metal with black metal influences, blackened death metal. Yet it is often doomy as well. A nice mixture, though maybe "nice" is an inappropriate word to describe music such as this.

Next up is "Kenosis". I had never heard of this term before so I looked it up. In Christian theology it means the self-emptying of Jesus' own will, becoming entirely receptive to God's divine will. The song is very sludge-metally. Like a lot of modern bands, they throw all the extreme metal sub-genres into a blender.

"Lithopaedic" has some heavy djentish riffs and very deep throated vocals from Frank Albanese. He sounds a bit like the vocalist of Bloodbath on Nightmares Made Flesh, Peter Tägtgren.

"Iosis" and "Decollation" just sort of run together, sounding very similar. A lot of this album does. Then at the end of "Decollation" they shift to a more rock-oriented guitar sound and at some atmospheric keyboards, giving the album some much needed variety.

By the time I got to "Death Complex", I found myself getting bored. It isn't bad music, but something about modern metal (the last 10 years or more) just falls flat every time. It just doesn't have the same energy or feel that 90's and early 2000's metal does. And no, it is not nostalgia! I was a child in the 90's and a teen in the 2000's. I was into nu-metal, then switched to thrash before getting into death and black metal and then it was only select bands. The music from that time period was just simply better.

The final track "Name Them Yet Build No Monument" really helps redeem the album, it may be my favorite track on it. Lots of great riffs. Definitely a good way to finish the record.

I want to like this album, and at times I do, I just find it bland and tiresome. However, this was just released released on the 4th and I am writing this review on the 14th. So this album hasn't had enough time to be given a full verdict, hence the title of the review being "Part 1."

A lot of great albums weren't my favorites at first. I bought Mastodon's Blood Mountain when it came out in 2006 and I did enjoy it, especially the tracks "The Wolf Is Loose" and "Crystal Skull." But I thought it was disappointing and overrated. It was years before I came to truly appreciate how great that gem of an album really is. I now consider it one of the best metal albums ever made, regardless of genre.

Ditto their 2004 release Leviathan and a lot of other albums including Trivium's Ascendancy, Amorphis' Tales of the Thousand Lakes, and even Metallica's Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning.

So only time will tell how great or bad this album truly is, but my first impression is that it is actually pretty decent and worth getting, but that it's a bit generic and sounds a lot like every other damn album of the genre and gets pretty tiresome when listened to as a whole. But that is coming from someone with a definite preference for the older metal, if your tastes runs more modern then perhaps you will have a higher opinion of Hath and their brand new album All That Was Promised.