Hidden Cruelty

At the day of the release of "Hidden Cruelty", the last chapter of a sometimes painful story was written. Maze of Torment's non-existent career came to an end. Honestly speaking, the loss did not cause insurmountable problems for the metal scene. A band with an appropriate portion of enthusiasm but without great song-writing skills called it a day. In the retrospective one must say that six albums were more than enough.

"Hidden Cruelty" was a big disappointment. After the strong "Hammers of Mayhem", I thought that the band had to some extent got things right. But not a bit of it. Maze of Torment's final album is a senseless series of non-melodic, emotionless riffs. The velocity is high, the lead vocalist is angry and the crucial factor is: the band offers absolutely nothing that would have justified another album. Most songs appear as flat and meaningless outbursts of energy. Only fragments can convince, at least to a certain degree. "Death Inhaled" holds an acceptable, rather slow mid-part. Yet it is light years away from a good thrash song. The start of "Day of Passing" is amateurish, but its second part scores with some decent riffs. A break after 1:10 leads to the more or less coherent riff celebration. Too little, too late. It is sad to see how the band has absolutely lost its course. Breaks and tempo changes seem to be a value in itself, any sort of catchiness is completely unknown and the solos are interchangeable.

Maze of Torment challenge Slayer, but how many bands already wanted to beat the thrash kings with their own weapons and, to bring up a painful subject, how many were successful? A lot of the here presented riffs are derived from the wildest tracks of albums such as "Seasons in the Abyss" or "South of Heaven". Mysteriously, the Swedish guys do not understand that they are doomed to failure when using the tools of the masters instead of offering a minimum degree of own ideas. Due to this situation, it is definitely irrelevant that the production shows the technical competence of a man called Berno Paulsson. He recorded, mixed and mastered the album in a professional manner. Nevertheless, the cold sound is not flawless, because it underlines the aloofness of the compositions. It sounds drastic, but it's true: the intro of their fourth work ("The Unmarked Graves") has more atmosphere than the entire sixth album. To illustrate the scale of the disaster, I want to add that this intro lasts exactly 43 seconds.

Do you see the guy sitting in the corner of the cover? The embodiment of desperation and hopelessness? Guess this was the first dude who was forced to listen to "Hidden Cruelty". Otherwise he would have been shot, just have a look at the gun behind the back of his torturer - and this, my dear friends, is one of the very few options which is worse than listening to this last work of Maze of Torment. Rest in peace, Swedish maniacs, "Hammers of Mayhem" will survive.

Well it isn't hidden exactly. As soon as 'Breach The Wall' begin you can notice and smell the large Slayerish "influence" like a piece of shit in a pool of water. Yes, this album screams "Slayer!!!!!" hundreds times louder than a casual horror movie's virgin who just saw an ugly killer rips her dog's penis out of the window and splashing it's guts all over.

I didn't noticed much death metal moments here, it's a Slayer ripoff all the way. The riffing sounds almost exactly like 'Seasons In The Abyss' or 'Reign In Blood'. The soloing is so wannabe 'Hanneman' but quite bad executed (or cloned) and the vocals sounds exactly like Araya's fast reading but in an amateurish way.

Seriously, you don't know how Slayer sounds like? Well, then bang your head unto the wall and then grab their classic albums right now and dig it. You do know how Slayer sounds like? Well, imagine someone took 'Reign In Blood' tabs and randomly changed parts of it. That's it. This album is so forced and so cloned that I just can't stand it. Why should I listen to this album when someone did it earlier and better? Yes, there are tons of bands which are inspired by Slayer, but this album isn't inspired, it's copied one by one.