Call it cultural stereotyping, but Italian heavy metal bands have historically gravitated toward more romantic and emotionally invested subgenres in the power, progressive, symphonic, and goth realms, leaving the sheer misanthropy of more extreme styles for Northern Europeans to master. This is certainly the case with black metal, which is why a few Italian proponents like Lucca's
Handful of Hate can accurately (and probably proudly) call themselves true "black sheep" amongst their countrymen. That's why, like the name says,
Handful of Hate leader Nicola Bianchi knows only one emotion -- HATRED! -- and the songs he vomits forth with the help of his willing accomplices on fifth album
You Will Bleed vary only from intense, to devastating, to decapitating, in getting that single emotion across. However, thanks to the group's intricate musicianship, densely layered arrangements, and ever shifting tempos, album standouts like "I Gave You Scars" and "Between Pain and Perdition" rarely get boring; mentally oppressive and almost physically exhausting, yes, but not boring. Notably, Bianchi's notoriously depraved and often misogynist lyrics have been toned down just enough here, or at least drenched in enough bloody metaphors, to swap gratuitous shock value for intellectualized loathing, if you can imagine that (did we mention the young man has a lot of hatred inside him?). Moreover, although good taste is ever in question and radical genre reinvention is never really in the cards for
Handful of Hate, the consistently high songwriting standards displayed on
You Will Bleed are impossible to refute, from the raging blastbeats and searing harmonics of the opening title cut to the abrupt shift into four-four rhythms for the spectacularly named closer, "Extremism Made Fire -- Cholera." This is pretty impressive stuff, love it or, ahem, hate it. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia