For a while there in the early and mid 00s, Chicago’s Lair of the Minotaur was where one of the most metal fucking bands out there.
The Steve Rathbone (7000 Dying Rats) led project, joined at times by the likes of Larry Herwig (Pelican), Chris Wozniak (Serpent Crown), Nate Olp (Demiricous), and others, kicked out 3 kickass albums and 1 DVD of pure metal that mixed thrash, sludge, black, and death metal into a battle vest-clad, testosterone-fueled ball of metal fuckery. They even found one of their songs (“Warlord” from 2010s Evil Power on a Tony Hawk video game.
But after Evil Power, the band broke up and took an extended hiatus until 2026, where Rathbone and Wozniak, now joined by Sanford Parker (Buried at Sea, ex- Minsk, ex-Nachtmystium) on bass, re-entered the fray to bring some no frills, no gimmick, no trends, no bullshit metal back into the scene.
The 30 direct as fuck minutes on I Hail I, as with the band’s back catalog, does not fuck about. It’s a burly, tumbling mix of styles that just encompasses all types of metal from grindcore, hardcore, to Celtic Frost, to Entombed’s Wolverine Blues, to fellow Chicago vets Cianide or Jungle Rot, Crowbar, Neurosis, and everything in between.
Rathbone’s gruff shout and the filthy guitars keep things extreme as the trio kicks out 9 tracks (and a sort of spoken word interlude) of unpolished, untriggered, unabashed chaos. It’s dirty, it has blast beats, it has slow churning grooves, it does everything a grizzled old metal head would want. Oh, and it’s all about Greek mythology, too. Fuck yeah! (*throws the horns up*).
You get the urgent gallop and stomp of the opener “Emperor of Dis”, the rumbling title track, the massive groove of “Saturnus Reign”, the more blackened “Family Tree”, and the pure doom/sludge crawl of 7-minute closer “Tartarus Apocalypse”, and like there infleucnces- everything in between.
Dad’s? – You really wanna show your burgeoning metalhead offspring what real fucking metal was really like 16 years ago, not the metalcore/deathcore explosion at the time? This is fucking it.
Yeah, this is real Dadcore.™
