Human Remains (Hell album)
| Human Remains | ||||
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| Studio album by Hell | ||||
| Released | 13 May 2011 | |||
| Genre | Heavy metal | |||
| Length | 1:06:00 | |||
| Label | Nuclear Blast | |||
| Producer | Andy Sneap | |||
| Hell chronology | ||||
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Human Remains is the first studio album by the UK heavy metal band Hell, released on Friday 13 May 2011 by Nuclear Blast Records.
The album contains re-recorded versions of songs originally performed by the band during the period 1982–1986, with minor arrangement changes and updates, along with the addition of new keyboard, orchestral, choral and soundscape parts added by Kev Bower. The album was pieced together over a 3-year period principally as a 'hobby project' during occasional periods of downtime at Andy Sneap's Backstage Studios, a converted 300-year-old dairy farm in Derbyshire, England. Sneap funded the entire project out of his own pocket and has been instrumental in the band's resurrection. The recordings were completed with neither hope nor aspirations of any outcome, and the original intention was to produce just a few CDR copies for the bandmembers, close friends and family.
The finished product, however, reached the attention of, and subsequently attracted bids from five record labels, with the band eventually signing to Nuclear Blast Records. The album entered the national charts in Germany and several Scandinavian countries upon its release. It received countless positive reviews and a substantial number of accolades, including '2011 Album of the Year' in Sweden Rock Magazine. It also made the No. 1 position for a 2011 UK album in 'Metal Hammer' (UK), along with featuring in the top 3 of 2011 for several European journals including 'Aardschok' (NL) and 'Rock Hard' (DE). The album also achieved the '2011 Album of the Year' on a substantial number of independent websites, rock forums and similar. The album's title is a wordplay, with obvious and immediate connotations of carcasses being turned upside down with the final lyric of 'No Martyr's Cage', the album's closing track.
Several tracks featured the voice of former frontman Dave Halliday, with Andy Sneap going to great lengths to lift his voice from old cassette recordings so that he could be incorporated and his memory suitably honoured. Sneap and the rest of the bandmembers also went to similar lengths (along with substantial legal and probate costs) to ensure that the album performance and compositional royalties were split six ways instead of five, with Halliday's share going to his surviving family - this process continues to this day, with Halliday's royalties continuing to be paid for live performance and radio airplay of songs to which he contributed writing credits. The album also ended up with a running time of 66 minutes and 6 seconds, and a file download size of 666MB. This was completely accidental and unintentional. The album also runs non-stop, with track gaps between the songs being filled by a series of musical interludes, introductions and soundscapes.
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