Hunters “From Birth to Soil”

"From Birth to Soil" is the self-released debut full-length from Chicago's Hunters, offering up eight tracks in a surprisingly compact 35-minute timeframe. Their style is an intriguingly high-energy form of sludgy, rocked out metal with ultra gruff vocals (occasionally accented by some higher sneers) that somehow manages to avoid being pigeonholed into any particular genre. I can't help but have later Entombed and Carcass' "Swansong" come to mind when listening to this album, but those are simply loose reference points, 'cause to my ears what these guys are doing doesn't really come across as "death 'n' roll" or whatever (I'm really not very fond of that term in the first place). It's actually kind of weird how rocked out the riffs are, though. It's possible that they'd just feel like a hard-hitting, really heavy rock band if the vocals were of a less aggressive nature. Who knows? You've got the rocked out grooves and lead bursts, some thrashy forays, a few little ambient noise interludes, dingy melodies, a consistently sludgy heaviness, and there are a lot of nice little dissonant chord phrasings and stuff, too. It's always interesting to me how a band like Hunters is able to take such familiar sounding influences/approaches and figure out a way to make them sound uncategorizable like this. Strong production and great cover art, too. Very cool. You can check out a few tracks below via Bandcamp (and stream the entire album from the band's website above):

They've also been kind enough to make the entire album available as a free download. To quote the exact words from an email I received, "We are into everyone jamming that shit for zero money." So, come on, you've just gotta respect that! Awesome. Have at it:

[DOWNLOAD] Hunters "From Birth to Soil" (@ MediaFire)