Stormborn

I guess it's time to be honest with ourselves – Bloodbound was never really a very good band. They constantly changed styles every album and while they did manage some good tunes, there just was never any real identity or focus to what they were doing. It was just so splattershot-random, even after they finally managed to keep a vocalist for more than one album. They played Swedish power/heavy metal, then a sort of heavied-up AOR, then a prog metal sound, then a Nocturnal Rites-style power metal, then boneheaded retro-metal and now a sort of Sabaton-esque anthemic sound. I guess you could say the hooky choruses were a linking factor that sort of strung it all together, but that's pretty flimsy.

Even beyond that, so much of their material for me has ended up sounding rather banal and unambiguous. It's straightforward in the most blunt, cheesy, dumb way, and I dunno, the older I get the less impressed I am by stuff like this. It's musical junk food – while you may be drawn in by the big choruses and shrieking vocals and heavy guitars, there's no substance underneath and it becomes rather tiresome to listen to due to the lack of any kind of intellectualism or subtlety. Not to say everything has to have some grand artistic purpose, but there's a grey area between that and stuff as outright disposable as Stormborn.

Maybe I would have liked this like 8 years ago when I was getting into metal, but not now. This is easily the weakest album of the band's career, with the least amount of songs I got any enjoyment out of. I've been following these guys since Book of the Dead, so it isn't like I just got this at random with no context. This is full of silly, stereotypical power metal with a few heavy riffs (like in the wisely chosen opener “Satanic Panic”) masking a majority of the album full of shiny power chords, lazy chug riffs and an over-emphasis on drums and ridiculous choruses.

The songs are boring at worst and outright laughably embarrassing at best. A lot of them are full of jawdroppingly retarded vocal parts where the band seems to think they're Powerwolf or something. Sometimes they evoke older Edguy, with the chamber-like keyboard sounds and organs, but they don't string together energetic enough songs by half to really be as good as even the fillers on Theater of Salvation. On tracks like “We Raise the Dead” and “Iron Throne” the band piles on the pomp and masks the fact that they have absolutely nothing redeeming underneath all the choirs and shouting – it's the old sound and fury adage.

The title track opens with another faux-epic chant that just makes me want to disassociate myself with the power metal scene, and “Made of Steel” sounds like a third-rate Dream Evil song, which is pretty bad because Dream Evil themselves are a third-rate band to begin with. Even “Satanic Panic,” which does open with a decent riff and some fairly energized shrieking, sinks into tedium in its second half (of its incredible four-minute runtime, by the way) as it just repeats the chorus over and over – sometimes in an overly melodramatic 'epic' bit yet again. Lame. I think the crowning achievement of sheer awfulness is in the middle of “Nightmares from the Grave,” in which a children's choir shows up to deliver the chorus in this already mediocre song. I'm just at a loss for words at the worthlessness.

I just don't even get, also, why we REALLY needed an album in 2014 with song titles like “Made of Steel” and “When the Kingdom Will Fall.” You really couldn't come up with anything better? If you're going to go the cliché fantasy route, at least try and put some imagination into it, ya know – just an effort to make something entertaining would be appreciated. Lyrics are just woeful and contain a bunch of shitty rhyming for the sake of rhyming. Like this:

Satanic satanic I'm evil in mind
Not a light in the dark you will find
Satanic satanic I'm evil in mind
Persecution the fate of our kind

If you have to put something like “you will find” to make a rhyme, chances are it's not a good set of lyrics on the whole. I get that these guys probably aren't native English speakers, but it bears saying anyway, as I don't remember being annoyed this much by the lyrics on the other albums. Choruses containing phrases like “we raise the dead, out of hell” or “made of metal, made of steel” just seem way too passe for a band with semi-senior standing in the scene after a decade.

Great performances and solid songwriting raised some of Bloodbound's past songs like “Behind the Moon” or “Drop the Bomb” above the average, and made them incredibly entertaining when in the mood for silliness and infectious hooks. However, on Stormborn the band is just going through the motions and there are zero really great, fun songs. I get it if you just want something dumb and fun, but even by those standards, Stormborn isn't a great example of the genre. Skip it unless you really need a potpourri of the worst elements of Hammerfall and Dream Evil in the same album.