Blue Blood

This three-track EP offers a good mixture of death metal and grindcore plus some avant-garde metal. Indeed, Atrocity manage to exhibit all these styles already at this early point in their career and prove that they are more than just another death metal band. I can’t compare this stuff directly to the Floridian or Swedish death metal scenes either, as Atrocity had their own interpretation of death metal. The production is very good for a late 80s underground death metal EP. The guitars are little dry perhaps but there’s no lack of power and all instruments can be heard. The bass is distorted, like on many contemporary death metal releases, and this works well since it adds roughness to the sound. Overall this stuff is not as technical as “Hallucinations” or “Todessehnsucht” but the technicality aspect and untypical arrangements are nonetheless already present here.

The best example of the death metal/grindcore mixture is the title track. It combines furious straightforward grindcore blasting with somewhat technical death metal passages. Occasionally it reminds me of a more technical version of “Harmony Corruption” era Napalm Death but the vocals are more varied than those of Barney Greenway. On this track, Alex’s vocals stick to the grindcore formula of both growls and high screams. “When the Fire Burns Over the Seas” is a short and slow avant-garde metal track, just under two minutes in length. It has quite a simple structure, yet the arrangements lean more towards jazz. Alex sings the whole track with clean vocals that have some kind of effect on them. The distorted bass plays an important role in this song and there’s quite a lot of guitar noise in the background, a very untypical track for a death metal band indeed. “Humans Lost Humanity” starts like a death/doom track but then it becomes faster, sounding pretty much like “Halluncinations” era material yet also including some grindcore type blastbeat passages. It’s great to see that this EP got another re-release together with “Hallucinations” and “The Hunt” (an excellent package for everyone who doesn’t own the early Atrocity stuff), as it’s much too good to be forgotten.