Hated By Humanity - No Need for Crying (2003)

HBH's "No Need for Crying" is a horrible album.

The music is horrible.
It's kind of punky speedmetal with a grindcore flavour, like a blend of Dead Kennedys and extreme metal. It is rough, unrefined, ugly and scabby sounding, and there are some reasonable riffs here and there - where they can be heard - but they are hard to get a good grip on, as...

The vocals are horrible.
I have seldom - and maybe never - heard vocals as fucked up, irrational, off-kilter, uncomfortable and generally awful sounding as the vocals on this CD. They are ghastly enough that they just about warp the space/time continuum, to find a worst moment on this album might be possible, but only if I could get through the CD a second time, which I don't think I could. That said, "Human Meat" was a particularly horrific number for me, the vocals have to be heard to be believed. This is HBH in their purest form, deliberately making the ugly into the deformed, the deformed into the dreadful and the dreadful into abominations. They push this agenda in every possible way, because even...

The playing itself is horrible.
Even with some good drumming holding it together, there are moments where HBH sound sloppy as fuck and quite obviously intend to be, they are notorious as the band who used to play completely shitfaced. I mean wow, the songs don't even seem to have an obvious end at times, they just sort of stumble to a stop like a wino finally passing out and falling on his face. Despite some clever moments like the loopy guitars in "I was a Teenage Smartbomb", they sound like four dudes who got pissed together and said "fuck it, let's write the worst and ugliest shit we can think of, rehearse it once and hit the studio with a $12.07 budget". This seems likely, as...

The recording quality is horrible.
Noisy and ugly, pretty much without a real mix at all from what I can tell, this sounds like the recording was treated with the same level of serious contemplation as the writing process. There is so little definition in the mix I have trouble at times hearing anything but the drums and white noise. This is obviously not something just left to chance, the mix is all part of the horror of the entire product, enhanced - or further corrupted - by some bizarre samples. That said...

The samples are horrible.
Oh fuck, but they really are horrible. In fact deplorable. Some of them sound like snippets from C-grade movies, some even sound like bits from snuff films. Whatever they are, they caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck and I actually felt a true sense of dread creep over me during one particular moment of morbidity. They have the affect of making the whole CD so much more twisted, as if it needed any more help...

The song names are horrible.
With such thought-provoking and sacarine-sweet song titles on this CD as "Rape is my Best Friend", "My Knife is a phallus", "Christfisting Satan Metal" and "Cannibles are Cumming (And you're gonna die)", there is little need to actually read the words, you know that they are gonna be fetid, dastardly, rotten and hienous in equal doses. Even scarier are the song titles like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Good looking Girl on the Bus", what sinister things are being done to these seemingly wholesome concepts? All this maladjusted nightmarish material is enough, right? Not a chance, because...

The artwork is horrible.
Crudely put together in the extreme, the CD slick has all the charm of the rest of the album. Black and white and appearing photocopied, it goes one step beyond forgiveness with what is probably THE most politically incorrect cover in the history of the universe. The famous pic of Kim Phuc at about age nine howling in horrible pain and running naked up a vietnam road after being severely burned on her back by a napalm attack has been doctored to instead have a child suffering from downs syndrome running in her place and with a big dopey grin. The Album name "No Need for Crying" is beneath it, a quite amazing concept in its raw twistedness. The first moment I saw this I laughed out loud, and yet the true nature of the awfulness of this design dawned on me within seconds, and now I swing between being mortified by the image and stunned by the brilliance of a design so lowdown and despicable that it can inspire such emotional turmoil in me.

Everything about this album is horrible. It is completely incorrect on every level, completely devoid of anything uplifting or comforting. It could have been steered into a sense of black comedy ala Cuntscrape, but any humour here is so black to be stigian, and other than the moment of weakness looking at the cover, I have detected nothing I am amused by, it has been sterilized of comic relief and it truely horrifies me. In a world of dark terrors and horrors untold, this album was able to make me feel dirty just by listening to it. I never want to hear it again and I really wish I hadn't had a cone before I listened to it.

Thus, it is GENIUS. FUCKING GENIUS! Hated by Humanity set out to create just such a masterpiece of sickness, and have succeeded spectacularly. SPECTACULARLY. Blase' and watered down emotionless shit bores me, and although I experienced no pleasure from listening to "No Need for Crying", I found it to be absorbing to a degree that was astonishing. I hate this album, and I want to tell you all to avoid this CD like testicular cancer, but I can't... I need you all to own a copy just so that we can be sure that there are no loose copies that might find their way into the hands of any paranoid schitzophenics.

I am blown away by this album, totally stunned by it. God help me.

Review by Jez.