Feeling a tad groggy on your humpday morning? Don’t worry, we’ve got a wake-up call that’ll slap your face hard, or perhaps we should say, swoop your face hard.
Enter the death metal group Hatebeak, the first band in history to be fronted vocally by a Congo African Grey Parrot, named Waldo. The outfit also consists of guitarist Mark Sloan and drummer Blake Harrison, whom both hail from Baltimore.
The avian-led trio’s sound pertains to the heavy-belting ferocity that the term death metal has grown synonymous with. Although Waldo’s screeches are obviously non-transcribable for human ears, the frontbird’s vocals paint a ghastly aesthetic akin to genre’s dark sounds.
There is firm questioning as to whether the band are merely “taking the piss” and insulting the forever hard-working metal scene, or truly living to their prerogative in “raising the bar for extreme music”. You be the judge:
Hatebeak astonishingly have released three split records, their sophomore entitled Birdseeds of Vengence which is shared with a similar idea Caninus. As the name alludes, Caninus was led by two pitbull terriors, Budgie and Basil.
Caninus were a deathgrind band whose front-pooches tragically passed on. Their sound featured Budgie and Basil howl, growl and snarl through the impending doom sounds that their backing band produced. Just picture the ancient Greek mythological beast Cerberus approaching a mic at the gates of hell and you’ve got Caninus.
We all love frontmen and frontwomen almost as much as we love our pets, with such a dangerous combo just imagine how many birds and bitches these band-leaders could get!
