I have been talking about how many great new albums and bands are coming from Belgium these days. Lately we had Guilty As Charged, Ethernity and Ostrogoth to name a couple of them. But lo and behold, another Belgian band sent their record to fall onto my doormat. Waiting For releases their debut album called: ‘The Hexen’.

Originating from the French speaking part of Belgium, these four guys make something like nu-metal. A short fun fact: this band was called The Hexen, until some time ago. They suddenly decided that Waiting For was a better band name, which resulted in a switch. Now their debut album is called ‘The Hexen’, mixed and produced by Biohazard’s Billy Grazeidei.

The style is very clear when ‘Nothing But The Beginning’ starts to play. It’s an instrumental intro displaying some low and heavy riffs and flowing straight into opener ‘I’m Cursed’. That’s exactly where the trouble begins. Being heavy, fast and loud, the music has it’s stuff pretty well sorted out, but the vocals are just terrible!

A couple of voices are heard throughout the entire album. We have two guys singing, mostly out of tune, and some grunts. The latter are the better vocals of them all. Most of what they do is not really singing, lucky us. It’s more of a fast talking, combined with some vocals. On a couple of tracks, ‘Why?’ and ‘Me, Myself And I’, for example, the vocals sound a little like the American Nu-Metal classics SOiL, but never reaching the quality of Ryan McCombs vocals.

What is left is the music, which is pretty much done before. This is far from a revolutionary Nu-metal band. Most of it consists of heavy riffs, fast drumming and some bass mixed slightly to the front. The songwriting isn’t particularly great either. Only ‘Me, Myself And I’ is really worthy of being noticed, also because of the pretty good lyrics.

Closing the album is a track called ‘We Can Fuck The Rules’. It stays in the Nu-metal scene, but this time it slightly shifts to the Prong kind of metal. The effects poured over the vocals in the refrain really reminds me of Prong in their ‘Cleansing’ days. But just like the rest of the album it’s plain and below average, it never really impresses.

This record is one of the lesser products finding its origins in Belgium. We had a lot of fun with other bands and then you know that one day there will be a lesser band to listen to. The vocals are bad and the music is mediocre. Apart from some parts of tracks, there aren’t much positive things to talk about. As the band makes clear in the closing track “We Can Fuck It All”, but that doesn’t make their album better.

3,5

Released: 18 September 2014
Record-label: Black Label
Website: www.waitingfor.be/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/watingfor

Tracklist:

1. Nothing But The Beginning
2. I’m Cursed
3. Let Me Go
4. Why?
5. Me, Myself And I
6. This
7. Waiting For
8. The Last
9. I Feel Like
10. No Hell
11. We Can Fuck The Rules

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