Free Discography Detector: Kevin Hufnagel
Do you like Dysrhythmia? Gorguts? Vaura? Sabbath Assembly? You like Kevin Hufnagel then. Now that we’ve sorted that out, you’ve only got 3 days left to grab The Most Innovative Guitarist In Metal Today‘s entire solo discography @ Name Your Price on Bandcamp.
Whether it was a coincidence or not, after our post on How To Play Bandcamp…And Win! I noticed a bunch of bands/artists embrace the Name Your Price option over charging set prices for their records. No matter if you consider it a noble gesture or clever selling strategy, it still means you get to choose a price for the album(s). As with all of our Free Metal Detector posts, we encourage you to throw the band/artist whatever you can afford for their art, or at the very fucken least share their music with your coinless cohort.
Today we’re not just looking at some obscure death metal demo or tripped-out black/death/thrash EP, we’re scoping an entire discography from Kevin ‘The Huff’ Hufnagel.
Just over a year ago I spent 40 dollarydoos (~US$28) to grab all the cuts I didn’t already have at a marginally discounted rate, and that was well worth it anyway. These records contain some of the most exquisite and incredibly textured guitarwork you’re ever going to hear; they hold endless replay value, and I would gladly pay that price again just to have them in my collection. Add to that the fact that his latest opus Messages To The Past wasn’t even released when I grabbed this pack and you’d have to be a fucking clown to pass picking these up for [insert your own price here].
Never heard his solo stuff? Rather than try to appraise each record anew in any kind of detailed manner (a task I’m utterly unqualified to do), I’ll just include a brief excerpt from a previous piece and urge you to experience each album for yourself.
With over 10 solo releases spanning two decades, you’d think a pattern could be drawn in such a timeline. However, Kevin’s progression has been anything but linear. What I can say though, is that his past three releases have perhaps more in common with each other than the majority of the preceding material. While he’s previously experimented with ethereal minimalism (Transparencies), avant-garde master manipulations (Backwards Through The Maze and Kleines Biest), and esoteric Eastern textures (Ashland and Songs For The Disappeared – my personal fave), the direction he set off on last year for The Protected Shards seems to have held over to a degree. Messages To The Past merges those resonant moments with the nostalgic reverence for the soaring 80’s melodic motifs which he adapted on his Halloween covers/tribute EP (His renditions of the Unsolved Mysteries and Phantasm themes ruuuule).
