CD-R, Bugs Crawling Out Of People, 2009
www.bugscrawlingoutofpeople.com/deadmanshill
On the 5th of April in 2008 there was a festival in the north of the Belgian city of Antwerp. Under the title “Live Noises #2” the Belgian label Silken Tofu organized performances by Condom, Frames a Second, Sektion B, Grunt, Shift (of which they later released a full time CD), Mourmansk 150, Broken Diode and Dead Man’s Hill. The performance of this last act has been released by the Canadian Bugs Crawling Out Of People on CD-R.
Only two tracks have been previously unreleased and admitted, the other releases by Dead Man’s Hill are unknown to me. The man behind the project is the Belgian Piette Yetayi and the music he makes is bombastic old-school industrial, something you might expect from In Slaughter Natives, Megaptera or maybe Deutsch Nepal. Though in all fairness it must be said that Dead Man’s Hill does not (yet) have the quality of these Scandinavian masters.
Let’s take the vocals as an example: through the multiple effects the vocals lack dynamics which makes them, sometimes, hard to take seriously. If they would have been over some layers of harsh noise, this kind of vocals would be much more acceptable. Same with some of the used sounds: it’s definitely not a bad thing to try to sound like your heroes, but I swear those choir-samples have died of overuse somewhere mid-90s.
The best compliment for this album is the non-stop energy it sends out. You can feel the impact the performance must have had on that cold day in Belgium, which is emphasized by the fact this release is already sold out (it was limited to 50 copies).
[6.5/10]
— Bauke van der Wal