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HAAN to Release By the Grace of Blood and Guts in August; Tour Dates Announced

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Oh, New York noise rock. You are timeless. You are crunchy. And you are mad, pretty much about being from New York. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. The rent’s too damn high and what used to be your favorite Chinese takeout place is now an artisanal meatball shop for cats. Such is the way of things, all carefully planned out to serve our capitalist rentier class overlords, so what’re you gonna do but plug in the instruments that you paid hard cash money for and make a lot of noise. Noise rock is like New York’s recourse to itself.

So maybe that’s where HAAN are getting the aggro vibes from. I’d say it’s in the water, but it’s in everything. Their album, By the Grace of Blood and Guts, will be out on Aqualamb Records in August in the label’s traditional format of the 100-page artbook, and the band will play the release show for it at the Saint Vitus Bar on Aug. 17 as the first night of a tour that goes to Aug. 25 in Detroit.

The PR wire puts it like this:

haan by the grace of blood and guts

One great peril in hard rock genre-hopping is that an inept band can simply end up diluting all of its sources of inspiration which, let’s be honest, is what happens more often than not. To synthesize something genuinely exciting, adept musicians need to obliterate the lines between genres rather than merely straddling them.

New York City’s HAAN understands this perfectly.

Initially founded as the quintet No Way in 2012, the group’s core trio of guitarist Jordan Melkin, bassist Dave Maffei, and drummer Chris Enriquez (now Andrew Gottlieb) explored a noisy post-punk inspired by the guitar daredevilry of Drive Like Jehu before embracing the crushing riffage of their bludgeon-rock forebears like Unsane and Deadguy. Dirgy psychedelia found its way into the mix as well, and there are even traces of southern-fried swamp rock grooves in their sound —and all of this is buttressed by a spine forged from the heaviest of metal.

Adding singer Chuck Berrett and adopting the name HAAN from a complex Korean term signifying collective feelings of isolation, injustice, melancholy, and insurmountable oppression, they announced their existence to the world in 2014 with the brutal and amazing cassette E.P. “Sing Praises.” In a mere four tracks, the band issued a remarkably clear statement of purpose-it’s a piledriver of an E.P.; dark, dirty, punishing, but richly complex, sharp-sounding, and utterly riveting. The cassette sold out quickly, but Finland’s notorious purveyors of noisy rock, the Kaos Kontrol label, released a vinyl edition that remains in print.

HAAN’s new album, “By the Grace of Blood and Guts,” ” is due in August on Aqualambrecords, a label that’s distinguished itself by releasing albums accompanied by 100-page art books, but BTGOBAG will also be released on gorgeous limited edition clear black smoke vinyl. Fans of “Sing Praises” will rejoice to hear that the full-length delivers the same kicks —Maffei and drummer Enriquez deftly manage the twin tasks of battery and fluidity while Melkin punctuates savage riffing with noisy passages that recall the mind-bending guitar needling of Daughters. Berrett channels a range of effective vocal stylings from that recall everything from the brawny expressiveness of Iron Maiden’s Paul Di’Anno all the way to the rhythmic incantations of Clutch’s Neil Fallon, and his way with a turn of phrase is undeniable as he conjures HAAN’s fight songs for the apocalypse.

“By the Grace of Blood and Guts” was engineered at Spaceman Sound in Brooklyn by Tom Tierney & Alex Mead-Fox (A Place to Bury Strangers, Kid Millions), and mastered by Chicago’s Carl Saff (Fu Manchu, Child Bite, Unsane). The INTENSE illustrations for the vinyl sleeve and art book were executed by vocalist Berrett.

TRACK LISTING

1. Thy Tongues 3:56
2. Hyena Moan 3:05
3. It Smells Like Gas 2:01
4. Zero Day 7:03
5. The Woke 4:42
6. Hangdog 4:07
7. Diminuendo 3:02
8. Funeral Song 5:52

HAAN:
Chuck Berrett – Vocals
Dave Maffei – Bass
Jordan Melkin – Guitar
Andrew Gottleib – Drums

HAAN will be touring with Finnish noise rockers Throat this August.

SUMMER TOUR DATES With Throat (Finland)
8/17 – Brooklyn, NY (record release) – Saint Vitus with Netherlands and Couch Slut
8/18 – Philadelphia, PA – The Barbary with Faking and Body Spray
8/19 – Baltimore, MD – Ottobar with Birth (Defects) + TBA
8/20 – Cleveland, OH – Happy Dog at Euclid Tavern + TBA
8/21 – Madison, WI – Art Inn with Coordinated Suicides + TBA
8/22 – Minneapolis, MN – Hexagon Bar with Tongue Party and Buildings
8/23 – Chicago, IL – The Burlington with War Brides and Salvation
8/24 – Milwaukee, WI – Cactus Club – Triple Eye Festival 3 with Them Teeth, Knaaves and Dead is Dead
8/25 – Detroit, MI – Cellarman’s Brewery with Them Teeth and Those Hounds

https://www.facebook.com/haannyc/
https://haan-nyc.bandcamp.com/
http://www.aqualamb.org/
http://twitter.com/aqualamborg

HAAN, “Hyena Moan” official video

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