Dirty devil metal with strong melodies as well as dark lyrics and pounding music.

Ah, the old 'Swedish Horror Metal' genre... if I had a Euro for every one of these babies I've had to review I'd now have one Euro. Hex are darker than a black hole in your Mother in law's heart, and they don't care who knows it, with no songs about soppy girls (except voodoo ones) here.

To be honest, horror rock can be lots of fun. Alice Cooper started it all (as far as I know), and the likes of Rob Zombie and Wednesday 13 are just two of the faithful carrying the scabby burning torch from hell. Well, you can certainly add Hex to that list, as their debut album is stuffed full of Daily Mail annoying titles like 'Succubus', 'Ave Satani', 'Dead Inside' and the ever popular 'Spider Baby'.

Lyrically it's as you would expect from the titles, but it's musically that it manages to pull it all off. Jonas Hygren, who writes all the songs, has a fairly typical horror rock growl that is just on the right side of tuneful (thankfully), and he has written some pretty catchy tunes to go with the death and dismemberment. There are strains of Nine Inch Nails and Rob Zombie, along with Alice Cooper's ear for melody. Keyboards sit side by side with the guitars, and the result is a pleasing industrial-light sound that is both powerful and melodic.

Hex aren't really doing anything new here, but in the genre they have picked they should stand out as talented new kids on the block. If you like dirty devil metal with strong melodies as well as dark lyrics and pounding music there's a lot to like here, although as with much of this stuff it can get a bit repetitive when taken all at once.

Alan Holloway