I love it when hardcore bands up their game. I understand it's hardcore and bands have made decade-long careers on releasing the same album year after year. Or usually they run out of material and gracefully bail out after an EP and one full-length. However with Prying Eyes Cruel Hand decided to out-do themselves with releasing one of the better if not best heavier hardcore albums of 2008.
I thought Cruel Hand's Without a Pulse was good album, full of mosh, sounded a bit too much like No Warning but it was enjoyable nevertheless. However, Prying Eyes trumps that album tenfold. Prying Eyes is the album I wanted way back in the '91 when I was hanging out with my fellow burn out friends smoking stolen cigs in front of the water tower outside of Owatonna High School. Most high school buds were true metal fans straight down to their long hair, markered up jean jackets, and having an unrelentingly devotion to the M&M of metal, Metallica and Megadeth. I always liked Megadeth a bit more myself when the subject was forced on me. And believe me, the issue of who was better was always forced as we flicked butts into the teacher's parking lot. In all honestly I just wanted to listen to Dinosaur Jr. and The Replacements and talk about the merits of early 90's indie rock. However, even though my friends knew I listened to a diet of SST type bands I was never allowed to bring them because that was all just "punk shit." Yes, sometimes my life resembled a scene straight from Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
Anyhow, back to the endless debate of who were the masters of true metal. The discussion usually ended up to a one smoldering boiling point of who was the better guitar wizard, Hetfield or Mustaine? I always picked Mustaine because he wrote better riffs in my high school all-important nothing else could possibly matter at this very moment opinion.
Now it's the tail end of 2008 and Cruel Hand decides to release a hardcore album that not only would have upped my punk credit with the three punks in my school that actually knew that Minor Threat existed and probably would been best friends with the one kid who knew who Agnostic Front was. However, my metal friends would of been all over Prying Eyes like an out of town girl at the roller rink in a White Lion shirt. Prying Eyes is metal as fuck early 90's style without all the masturbatory guitar solos or songs about nuclear devastation. Best of all there's some good riffs that would make the even the most bald of the boots and braces sect bang their clean dome mercilessly.
So here we have it, the best early 90's metal album parading around as hardcore album on biggest hardcore label. It's okay, Cruel Hand I see through your charade and I think it's awesome. Please for the love of all those small town punk kids that hand no one to hang with besides the burnouts, keep releasing over the top metal without the metal bullshit. We need albums like Prying Eyes so we have something to jam in the tape deck...errr...CD player in crappy two door teenager cars as we cruise the main drag in town looking for girls that will ignore us tomorrow in math class.
