In the forgotten backwoods, abandoned cellars and dimly lit city alleys of this devastated remnant of social collapse prowl psychotic minds that rule their victims with fear and torture and traumatic pain shall be their legacy on earth. Serial killers have left their bloody trail on our culture because of their mechanical insistency of treating people as objects, as useless organic spawn of a world that offers little appeasement for neurotic, frustrated impulse or desire. As if to prospect a visceral counterpart to the psychoanalytical surgery of many previous albums of the week, such as “Changes” and “Hallucinations” (both appropriately originating from Central Europe), this ritual of Blood alongside the recent Autopsy review lunge into gore and swarming maggots, while entrails burst and bodyparts are severed by brutal bludgeoning weapons.
Readers of our zine archives have noticed the tremendous impact of Napalm Death and Carcass pioneered social but spirited grindcore upon the entire scene, as well as how quickly the failure to invent surprising music within the boundaries of the style evaporated the desire of bands and audiences alike to keep to the principles of grind as something sacred. While countless German demo bands were cranking out noisy, self-indulgent and hectic odes to fun and horror movies, Blood’s economical but poetic hallucinations spanned the philosophical (“Linear Logical Intelligence”), the mythological (“Kadath”) and twisted black humor (“Sodomize the Weak”), building into an entire self-consistent worldview on par with the anguished, outwardly more serious output of contemporaries Morgoth and Atrocity.
The tuneless, stumbling, roaring moments recall Canada barbarians Blasphemy and early Voivod, while the drawn out, precise clarity glimpsed like sun behind the clouds when the band regroups and reformulates its attack through moments of slow, traditional metal riffs are akin to Finnish death metal moments (hardly surprising as this band was widely heard in early 90′s Finland despite being almost forgotten nowadays). The truncated track lengths (3 minutes maximum) reveal an ascetic, rigorously disciplined plan to build albums from sheer musical force of expressionism, cut into bits as in a Burroughsian tapestry of absurd and horrifying moments trapped inside the madness of civilization and natural lifecycles. Nothing could be farther from the haphazard, elongated drone rock-outs that characterize trendy metal of the new millennium, so it is perfect time to taste the Blood.
Filed under: Death Metal Album of the Week — Tags: Death Metal, German Death Metal, Gore, Grindcore, Society — Devamitra @ May 26, 2010 23:03 — Comments (3)
This album is seriously the best goddamn grindcore album ever. I consider myself lucky to own a copy. The follow-up, Mental Conflicts, is great as well.
Comment by the goddamn batman — May 27, 2010 @ 01:54
[...] if unpretentiously, combined lurching doom with Carcass-inspired corpse-shredding chaos much like Blood did a thousand miles away in Germany, creating a devastating, desolate atmosphere by manipulating [...]
Pingback by Death Metal Album of the Week: Evisceration – Hymn to the Monstrous « DeathMetal.Org — July 22, 2010 @ 16:31
[...] bastions of extreme metal, Germany herself has birthed not a few great extreme metal acts including Blood, Ungod, Nox Intempesta, and Atrocity. Continuing this tradition and formed in 1991, Fleshcrawl have [...]
Pingback by Death Metal Album of the Week: Fleshcrawl – Bloodsoul « DeathMetal.Org — September 15, 2010 @ 01:34