Novelty metal has come to be its own thriving cottage industry, namely in the form of viral videos and attention-seeking mash up covers. With the expected amateur, part-time commitment expected of such fleeting virality, though, it's no surprise that much of the novelty metal niche has a blink-or-you-miss-it quality. Not so with Baltimore's parrot-led Hatebeak, as pisstake a long term metal project as the genre has seen.
The longevity of Hatebeak – as opposed to all those "15 minutes of slightly lesser obscurity" viral videographers – is no doubt owed to it being the project of two legitimate metal lifers, Blake Harrison of Pig Destroyer and Mark Sloan of The Index. Hatebeak seems to be something the two get together on whenever they find a down moment (presumably their avian frontbeak, Waldo, is pretty much always down for whatever). At least, you definitely get that impression by listening to it; there's exactly as much effort put into the rote drum programming and demo-quality recording quality as you would expect from an act whose one and only selling point is that there's a goddamn parrot in the captain's chair.
Number of the Beak never even remotely rises above the novelty conceit, with even Waldo's "vocals" just as often sounding like some shrill electronic distortion as it does actual singing of any sort (say what you will about former peers Caninus [RIP], but at least the pit bull's barking somewhat approximated the cookie monster growl expected from boilerplate death metal). And considering Number of the Beak mostly consists of reprised cuts from out of print EPs, I wouldn't go digging through the outfits back catalog looking for superior renditions of the same schtick, either.
Still, you can't help but feel like a bit of a stick in the mud for holding this shit to any kind of objective standard in the first place… so I won't. Just don't expect to break this out for a second listen at all unless you have party guests over that are easily impressed. Everything you need to know about the intent and execution of Hatebeak is self-contained in the title of this Youtube video of "Seven Perches" (which is actually kinda funny in a Seth Putnam sorta way… but didn't most of us just read the Anal Cunt song titles for a laugh without actually firing up the album?)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iBpm0kUdoQ[/youtube]
