Blut

What a huge disappointment! With their previous releases Atrocity had become one of my favourite technical death metal bands. However, somewhere along the way the band apparently decided that being a godly technical death metal band wasn’t cool anymore and so they changed style radically. As you can see from my score, the change was definitely for the worse! The music has lost nearly all of its former technicality and about 95 % of its brutality as well. For the most part “Blut” consists of music that can be described as lame and pseudo heavy attitude/numetal and weren’t it for a couple of bright spots, I’d have given this album a zero.

What you get here is mostly simple mid-tempo songs with chugga-chugga riffs, groove and limp-dicked wannabe tough guy vocals. The first three tracks and “Moon Struck” are the purest examples of this style and each one of them is so horrible that I almost burst into tears when I listened to “Blut” for the first time. The only positive thing is that the beginning of “Miss Directed” resembles that of Asphyx’s “Diabolical Existence”. Otherwise this track is truly awful, with Alex sounding almost like he’s rapping! Also shouted lines such as “Miss Directed, c’mon!”, “Miss Directed, bring me up!” and the “crowning” achievement “One, two, FUCK YOU!” serve the purpose of increasing the jump-da-fuk-up factor to the max. And yeah, this was back in 1994 when numetal wasn’t even established yet! Anyway, I’m not going to go on about these four tracks anymore. Let’s just say that they were like a punch to the solar plexus.

“B.L.U.T.” is the first track that shows a glimpse of promise. It starts in a doomy manner with the bass high in the mix and some nice bass lines from Markus Knapp, actually creating a dark feeling. However, this feeling of darkness only lasts until 1:30, when the track turns into numetal garbage with some horrible shouty vocals and uninspired drumming from Michael Schwarz who doesn’t get to show almost any of his real skills on this album. “I’m in Darkness” may begin with shitty chugga-chugga riffing but despite this it’s one of the few listenable tracks on the whole album. It even carries death metal influences in the form of double bass drumming, blastbeats (yesss!!!) and some of the riffs. Alex’s vocals are almost growly during parts of this track, proving that he’s still got it if he only puts his mind to it. However, as a whole “I’m in Darkness” of course pales when compared to Atrocity’s previous output.

“Calling the Rain” was some kind of hit for the band. Well, to me this acoustic song with female vocals added sounds about as interesting as “Nothing Else Matters”. The fact that it’s too long and repetitive as well doesn’t help either. “Ever and Anon” is a track which is almost tolerable. It has some heavy riffs, fairly technical parts and a nice solo section. Therefore it’s too bad that Alex’s horrible shouty “badass” vocals manage to ruin a lot of the feeling in this song. I can’t for the world understand why he chose to use such vocals on this album when the truth is that they sound like shit. Oh yeah, and they just HAD to put some chugga-chugga riffs into this track as well, dammit! “Begotten Son (of Wrath)” is another almost tolerable track (if we look away from the chugga-chugga parts) due to some pretty complex rhythm changes and riffing that hint at the band’s former death metal glories. However, the last part of the song lapses into total numetal mode and I quickly lose interest.

“Leichenfeier”, “Goddess in Black” and “Threnody (the Spirit Never Dies)” are the best songs on “Blut”. The first is a doom metal song with heavy, almost sludgy riffs and narration plus haunting clean operatic vocals. It’s a total surprise to hear a good track such as this on an album that is mostly really crappy but as I said in the opening paragraph, there are a few bright spots here. “Goddess in Black” sounds pretty much like “Lepaca Kliffoth” era Therion (minus the symphonic elements). On this track also Alex’s shouty vocals sound quite like those of Christofer Johnsson on said album. “Threnody (the Spirit Never Dies)” is a heavy and technical track, probably written during the band’s earlier days. Had Alex sung this track with death metal growls, it would’ve been fantastic.

While there are hints of death metal on some tracks, these are practically always countered and watered down by the numetal parts and vocals. The band probably had some old death metal stuff left over and then decided to mix it with this numetal style. Too bad it doesn’t work, the mixture they present here is simply... atrocious! Another thing I really hate are the female vocals, since the female vocalist doesn’t sound good at all. I can’t shake the feeling that the band decided to include female vocals just to show how open-minded (or whatever) they are, as I’m of the opinion that the female vocals actually make the songs where they are used sound worse. The aforementioned factors make it impossible for me to enjoy the vast majority of this album.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about “Blut” is that it has some kind of a vampire concept and according to the band’s Myspace page “enables the listener to feel the dark scenery and fascinating atmosphere of Transylvania”. I can only say that I got absolutely no Transylvanian vibes at all. Instead I saw visions of pseudo metallers with piercings, dressed in hoodies with numetal band logos and pants three sizes too big running through the streets.