This is our 'Frequently Asked Question' sheet. While we don’t actually get asked all these questions frequently, I hope this will help explain the theories and concept behind Hyperblast a bit more in depth than is presently available on the site now. This will also give you insight to the ethics behind the staff members and precisely why we do what we do here.

Will you accept a free CD from my band and review it?

We have recently modified this rule to allow for ACTUAL discs and tapes from bands. Contact Loki (blood.shall.run@gmail.com) if you are interested, and he will direct you to the appropriate reviewer. However, we still do NOT accept promos. It is not to be rude, or to present ourselves as being too good to review unsigned bands-that’s not the case at all.

Here’s the concept behind this; everyone on this staff basically lives and breathes Metal. It’s basically why we get up in the morning, so we vehemently support the artists we find and enjoy. We fully believe in purchasing our CD’s. We’re by no means anti-music download or anti-mp3, it’s a great way to sample new bands, but we don’t feel we can accurately review a CD based on something we downloaded. Every CD featured on Hyperblast is owned by at least one member of this staff, you can go to our houses and find physical copies in our collections. We typically buy our albums from the distributors featured on Hyperblast’s front page and we recommend anyone use them. They’re not there because they give us free CD’s from their label all the time, but because we spend a great deal of money with those companies to find our music. The idea is that if you’re a new band and you’re trying to get your demo out there, Hyperblast is not the venue you want to go through to be honest. We don’t have any connections with any record label, furthermore we believe that a band should get their demo on a record label, or release it themselves, and create enough interest in the underground to make one of the staff members BUY the CD. You’re not trying to get people to want your CD for free, you’re trying to get them to buy it. This can go both ways as being good or bad. When the staff of Hyperblast buys an album that is good we fully endorse it and recommend others to make the same purchase, but if we buy it and hate the album then we’re going to give it one hell of a bad review because we didn’t like the album at all. I’m not saying that everyone would agree with every assessment 100%, but Cleric has tried to hire a staff that has slightly diverse taste from his own, so people that favor the genre of, say, Thrash Metal will follow Sadistikal’s reviews and probably become loyal readers for him. Most of the time we work backwards in the sense that if a band gets big enough and they repress their demos on a CD then we’ll usually track down the CD and review that instead of getting the demos outright. I know that may sound strange to some people, but that’s how we are setup here.

Why don’t you receive promos from record labels?

This is where some real business ethics come into play. We believe that as a record label it is your job to market the bands you sign and it is your job to make us interested in your bands enough to purchase a CD. We are not the normal magazine based concept; we are also your customers. It is believed that we greatly benefit the readers by completely mimicking their actions as customers, so this way it would basically be like reading their feelings after making a purchase. We try to point readers in the right direction as to what we feel are hit and misses. For instance, sometimes a band gets marketed or buzzed really well in the scene and is only mediocre, then better bands receive less buzz, but deserve more. We try to sift through all of that and put together the choice pieces. However, if the record labels don’t do a good job of making the albums look interesting to us, then they aren’t doing their job as a record label, especially if you’re in a good band. It’s a tough industry to break through and basically there is an information overload aspect hitting the music scene nowadays with so many bands in the market place, it seems like guesswork when buying CD’s. From time to time the writers will go on a random CD spending spree and pick up, say, five albums twice a year at complete random just too see if they can hit anything worth mentioning. We’ve gotten a couple good hits here and there, especially seen in bands like Blut Aus Nord, which was a totally random purchase by Cleric and then Ionous was compelled to buy the CD shortly thereafter, then Sadistikal and finally Loki had to acquire a copy as well.

Another reason for not getting promos is because promos don’t always come with full packaging. A lot of times they come in cardboard sleeves which give very little information about the band and are the least interesting thing to look at. If a band has a really interesting design layout, we like to mention that in our reviews. When people go to the length of buying a CD and spend fifteen U.S. dollars, on average, for a disc, they aren’t just buying the music. They’re getting the whole package, the lyrics, the booklet, the layout and the design aspects of the album. All of these things are actually important when making a sale. Statistics show that a distro that features album covers has more sales than a distro that doesn’t. If we buy a CD and it has a shitty booklet, like Marduk’s original pressing of “Dark Endless” on No Fashion Records, then you, the reader, should be made aware of this before buying it. The music more than made up for the layout in this case, but if the music sucked, Cleric would’ve been doubly pissed off about it. There are only three promos featured on this site, Solekahn’s first album, Fatima Hill, and Shape of Despair. These are on the site because Cleric was asked to do some guest reviews on another webzine because they were swamped with so much work; this was before Hyperblast had become the mammoth archive it is now, so he obliged his friends and did the work. Unfortunately that webzine has since been shut down, but the reviews of those three albums are still featured here. This is another testament to why we don’t want promos; that Fatima Hill disc was a style of music Cleric personally hates with a passion. It was Power Metal based music, and if we received promos from every Record Label we could find we would have to sift through a lot of bad music and we would hardly have time to find the lesser known gems because some of the best bands never issue promos. Take Deathspell Omega and Mütiilation for example, we may have never heard this bands because we were too busy sifting over the piles of bad Power Metal albums we had to choose from.

The final and probably most important reason why we don’t receive promos is because we want to give completely objective reviews. We don’t want the readers to look through our site and say “they’re just doing this to get promos” or “they’re just trying to sell CD’s for the labels that give them free stuff.” We will never be sold out, we are dedicated to quality assurance, and we don’t want to feel like we owe a record label anything. Our respect is earned and not for sale, you can’t buy our respect with free CD’s. You earn our respect by giving us good customer service and if we are happy with that facet of your company, then we will tell everyone we know to order CD’s from you, not because you give out free promos.

Can you advertise (insert whatever product or business you have) on your site?

We’re a webzine… this is basically free publicity for any band. No you can’t have banners of something on our site. No you can’t offer us money to put a banner up. We won’t sell out under any circumstances. Our readers come here because they know we buy our CD’s, they know we’re actual customers just like them, they know they’re not going to see any of those goddamned annoying banners they see on countless other webzines. The most Cleric will ever do in support of your site is add a link in our measly links section, which gets barely any hits. Links change too often for us to care. There really aren’t all that many webzines out there that have earned our respect as writers and customers. It’s not because all of them base their site around getting promos, but because their reviews don’t have any substance and they don’t even tell us what we’re getting into. (Please note the reviews done by Cleric in High School may fall under this category, he is slowly but surely going through his archive of hundreds of reviews to fix the ones that are grossly at fault, especially the ones from eleven years ago when he was fourteen)

You’ve had the same web page design for over five years now, why don’t you change it?

(Cleric will field this one personally:)
I don’t want to. It’s that simple. It’s functional; I’ve heard other webmasters from other webzines tell me the design is the shittiest thing they’ve ever seen. That’s right kids; there are no bells and whistles here. Is this site functional? Yes it is. Can you navigate it? Yes you can. It’s not a very challenging concept, but the readers do have a choice, I can either shutdown the site for a month while I make up an ENTIRELY new design for it, or I can do more quality reviews. That’s a real tough decision for me; I’d rather give our readers more stuff to look at rather than fancy web design. Fancy web design doesn’t mean you have quality reviews, in fact, as I have come to learn usually it means you have shitty reviews that make no sense. It also means you have a review archive that will become problematic to navigate when you feature over 1,000 albums like Hyperblast. After saying all that, this leads us to the next point…

You guys sound like such elitist assholes, why?

Well, we’re really not in most senses of the word. We just fully believe in putting time and effort into your music and we are completely dedicated to this concept. We try to be as meticulous as possible with the information we publish in our reviews, hence why we are so dedicated to the music that we actually flat out purchase our albums. We feel that if you’re going to go to the length of making a webzine where you review music then you should review every aspect of it and you should be dedicated to at least one of the genres. It pisses us off to no end when we look at a review that starts off “I’m not really a Black Metal fan at all…” Now how in the hell do you hope to convince your readers that your opinion is in anyway valid. Or furthermore how do you expect your readers to think that there will be anything informative about the review you’re about to do? All that’s going to happen is someone is going to read that first paragraph, read the review, and wonder if it’s actually true. Secondly we think you should know what genre things belong in. We have witnessed such folly’s as “Behemoth ‘Demigod’ is 100% Black Metal.” Well that makes no sense at all, “Grom” is pretty much 100% Black Metal, “Demigod” has some Black Metal elements, but it is hardly 100%. If you think it’s okay to print stuff like this, or are one of the people that print stuff like this, then yes we can become quite assholes to you. Because it makes us angry that the next generation of Metallers comes into this world read the misinformed trash any webzine run by a 13 year old can conjure up and then they think this is fact. We bear witness to this in forums across the board; we talk to record labels who complain about the same thing, the misinformation stops here and stops now. We try to cross reference our information; we have even had bands contact us to praise our reviews. We have our links on the pages of distros and record labels that believe in us and it’s not because we asked them to, it’s because they looked at our site and said “Hey, these guys work really hard at what they do.” We work under the premise quality assurance (which means, providing quality and accurate reviews to our readers) as hard as the musicians work on their music and as hard as the record labels work on building their business. We’re not making money on this, Cleric finances this all by himself and it’s technically a loss in his income right now. We’re here because we like it here, because we believe our readers want to get educated about music and it’s not outlandish for our Staff to spend a week mulling over an album before they start writing a review.

What are the goals of Hyperblast?

Our goal is to become the most well respected website on the web for Extreme Metal, Black, Death, Thrash, and Doom Metal, for our four most major chosen genres and we want to do all this without advertising anywhere, we want it all done by word of mouth. You’ll never see an advertisement in a magazine. You won’t see our name in Terrorizer or Metal Maniacs unless someone puts it there of their own accord. We think we have the right model to get our name out there purely by readers enjoying what we do. We come at this with a certain degree of expertise and we try to boast that the youngest of our staffers have five plus years in the field of listening to Metal. The two main writers on the staff, Sadistikal and Cleric, have eleven plus years in the field as of 2005. We don’t audition writers either, we recruit and we want to keep the staff small so that readers can become familiar with a writer. I have found over the years that if I find a reviewer that I typically agree with constantly, then I will stick with that person’s recommendation. I have a feeling it is similar with Hyperblast. You find the reviewer whose musical opinion agrees the most with yours and more often than not, you’re getting good music. That’s really what it’s all about, reviews are typically opinion based at the start, but we try to add a degree of fact behind our work in some cases, so our reviews hold more weight behind them than others. For example when Cleric makes a comment about the guitar work on an album, it’s not coming from some guy who has never picked up a guitar in his entire life, it’s coming from a trained guitarist with nearly twelve years experience. So that should give some degree of knowledge on the outlook of a guitar performance.

Is Hyperblast 100% accurate all the time?

Absolutely not. Through hundreds of pages of text we cannot hope to be completely error free. We certainly try our damnedest, but we can’t put a stamp on the site saying “error free.” We’re all human after all, and if you listen to Black Metal long enough you’ll realize that human imperfection is one of the reasons for the misanthropic nature of the genre. Anyway, if you ever catch an error, no matter how minor we encourage you to e-mail Cleric at your leisure, we would be happy to fix whatever we have accidentally mixed up on. Please don’t send us e-mails about how the review is wrong because it is actually a good CD, no matter how clever you feel. We don’t guarantee agreeing with everyone’s opinion 100% either, plus that’s just silly to do that. However, if you wish to e-mail us and discuss the point in a civilized debate, all our staffers greatly enjoy debating even over mundane points on the reviews. We recently had someone that disagreed with a Nargaroth review and got in contact with Loki, we try to answer any e-mail we get and we enjoy objective criticize and explaining further what we write at times. Either way, typos or the like are absolutely fair game.

Do you review any other genres of music on the site?

Yes, sometimes we will delve out of our homes and review other areas of music, but we don’t really stray very far. We will typically review Ambient based music such as early Mortiis or Rajna; some of our staffers really enjoy that type of music. Also from time to time an Industrial group might hit the site, such as Ministry or Hocico. That’s basically all we have so far for that kind of genre. All of us listen to various genres of music, but Hyperblast is more centered on extreme and underground Metal, so we don’t stray too far from that. While we have these other genres we don’t have any Power Metal. Most of our staffers don’t particularly enjoy Power Metal and it doesn’t really belong in the same category next to Death Metal and Black Metal, which is what our primary readers seem to be more concerned with.

A final word from Cleric:

This is what Hyperblast is all about. It’s about the truly dedicated fan of the music. It’s for the person that believes in the music they listen to and truly appreciate what the musicians are trying to do. It’s for the readers who want to delve deeper into the genre they like. I hope all of our readers enjoy Hyperblast as much as we enjoy creating it and writing in it. We’re not all serious all the time, we have our shared degree of humorous reviews on the site because, lets face it, some stuff is really bad and it’s fun giving it hell. I’ve noticed that the reviews that get the most hits are sometimes the ones where we tear apart an album a lot more. I can’t say why that is, but apparently people like reading about how something is bad. Regardless of why you come here or why you enjoy reading our work so much, I hope you’ll all stay for years to come and spread the word to everyone you know. I hope you believe in our ethos behind the site and I am sorry to the bands that have offered to send their demos. I hope you can understand this point of view, and if you don’t, I hope it won’t discourage you from reading our work because if you play your cards right, down the road you might see your band featured here with a stellar review under its name. Then you’ll know you’ve accomplished something, not only being featured here, but also that someone was convinced enough to buy your CD, or heard your music from a friend and wanted to hear more and more. Good luck to all the bands starting out, I wish you luck and I can’t say thank you enough to our readers out there, you have no idea how much we appreciate the support you show us by hitting up our site or e-mailing us.