Hell's Rebirth

Along with Nunslaughter, Cianide have become perhaps Amercia's most reliable providers of wormy, massively heavy old school death metal. For the most part they labor in obscurity, cranking out toxic metal from the windy city of Chicago, while fans worldwide remain sadly oblivious to the impressive power this band possesses. This is probably because Cianide have nothing to recommend their music except for their music itself. No inverted cross brandings, no obscene album covers, no objections from political candidates, just pure fucking metal. And that's all their music is as well: pure fucking metal. No female vocals, no drum triggers, no hyper-grind, no gore lyrics, no metal-core riffing, just the goods, pure and simple. But Cianide have been at this so long that they are about as expert at creating this type of music as anyone could hope to be. Their guitar and bass tones are dark, thick and syrupy. The drumming is skilled, but restrained. The vocals are raw but hardly in tune with most death metal gore gargles. And the recording captures all this goodness with out frills, just heavy as hell straight ahead recording. You get the idea that this band are as happy as being compared with Motorhead as they would be with Master or Slaughter. Meaning that their allegiance to and love of metal itself is greater than loyalty to a single sub-genre. A good attitude to have.

This album sees the band continuing on the track they've been on for some time. They've long since left behind the super slow doom tempos that dominated their early work, and concentrate for the most part now on creating mid to fast paced cuts that are mostly brief enough to make their point and then split. "Death Metal Maniac" is a good example of this, while "Powerhead" proves this band can still pull amazing riffs out of the most simple, well-worn metal arrangements. But they also do something they've not done in awhile, and that's create a monstrous, slow moving epic metal track. "Wormfeast" is that cut, a welcome look back at the band's earlier days of ponderous, titanic tunes. And then lo and behold, as a hidden cut they blast out into a cover version of Death's classic "Infernal Death." How can you be old school and not utterly love this band?

Cianide have again delivered unto us an album of their chunk style, no frills death metal. And in these days of too many gimmicks and not enough plain old laying down the law, that's nothing to take for granted. Death is Metal. Metal is Death. Cianide Death Metal!!!!

Cianide is an old Chicago based death metal band. In the glory days of Chicago when bands like Master, Abomination, Broken Hope, and Oppressor reigned destruction on the populace, there was fertile ground for death metal bands such as Cianide to get crowds and have a superfluous underground outreach and fair popularity. But those days are long gone and as people drifted away from the scene the memories of how glorious it was drift along with them until one day it will all be lost and forgotten in the eternal sands of time.

But until that happens, we can expect certain small remainders of the lost glory to pop up at unexpected times and obscure moments. Cianides "Hells Rebirth" is one of those little remainders of the dead old school scene.
Hells Rebirth is a straight out old school sludgy death metal onslaught in the vein of Master and Hellhammer, and with apparent roots in thrash metal. The riffs are murderous, the production is terrible and raw, and the atmosphere is ominous. This is truly a piece of the old school. Songs like "Death Metal Maniac" and "Trust No One" will unleash unsuspecting terror upon you as you will slowly come to realize how truly glorious this scene was. "Fires That Consume" and "Powerhead" will make you thrash around like a fucking retard as they take you on a trip down the corridors of time to Chicago IL circa 1990.

Hells Rebirth is nostalgia. Recommended to old schools fans and as Cianide like to summarize it, "Death Metal Maniacs" only. Enjoy this release, I have a feeling we wont be seeing many like it in the not so distant future.
Thrash till' Death.