Realm of Chaos (Slaves to Darkness)

Welcome to "Criminally Overrated Classics", starring Bolt Thrower´s second album 'Realm of Chaos'. If you did a poll among fans about their favourite Bolt Thrower record, this one is very likely to come up as #1 in the end. When I´m writng this there are 25 reviews on Metal Archives, making an average of 95% with the worst review still giving 80%. The impression raises that literally everyone who likes death metal praises this record, and I feel obliged to show that this is not the case.

I will start my review with something that I actually really enjoyed: the sinister atmosphere. Karl Willetts´ vocals make this album sound really dark, so does the tuning. Bolt Thrower went all the way down to fucking A. Considering that this was in 1989, they were probably the first well known band to ever go this low.

The songs themselves are ok, they never go beyond that though. Every song features parts I like, but when thinking about the whole song, no matter which one I take, I just remember either boredome or the feeling that it was just alright. There is not a single song I´d call good.

For a band that is praised for having some of the best riffs in all of metal, the riffs on that album are pretty weak. For instance the main riff of the beloved fan favourite "World Eater" is absolutely shallow and bores the hell out of me. It feels like Bolt Thrower wanted to create something huge, but ended up using riffs that anyone who has been playing guitar for one year could come up with. If I had the idea to this riff, I would have put it to waste instantly. The outro riff is kind of cool though, because it will be brought back in a series of sequel songs on later albums. Probably the best riff on the album is found in "Eternal War" right after the first blast beat section. This one actually has a cool drive.

This brings us to the first major problem: the songwriting, especially the fast parts. One point of criticism is purely subjective. One of the elements I enjoy the most about extreme metal is the skank up-beat. In case if someone doesn´t know: The skank beat is the one often used in thrash metal and hardcore punk. If you listen to a Slayer song, you are very likely to here skank beats. And an up-beat is just the describtion of a beat with the kick drum on 1 and 3 and the snare drum on 2 and 4, while a down-beat is basically a reversed up-beat, having kick on 2 and 4 and snare on 1 and 3. While down-beats can be cool at times, I perfer the driving force of an up-beat. And 'Realm of Chaos' does not offer the skank up-beat. If Bolt Thrower go fast, they either use a blast beat or a skank down-beat, which personally annoys me. Back to points of criticism that are less subjective: Coherent songwriting is pretty rare on this album. The fast parts are just thrown into the middle of the songs without any thought, and as the album goes on they all start sounding the same. There are so many ways you could build up fast sections. One common way is to let one guitar play the riff, the other instruments just hit the accentuations and then all hell breaks loose. A very cool way to build up a fast part, but not the only cool way. So why do Bolt Thrower avoid using different methods and always come up with the same build up over and over again? And the riffs used within the fast songparts are nothing more than slight variations of each other. One of the reasons for that may be a problem I want to adress in the next paragraph.

The production is really bad. For this groove-oriented type of death metal that Bolt Thrower went for they would have needed a thick guitar sound similar to the records that followed. The guitar sound on this album is neither powerful nor raw, at least not in a cool way like it is for instance in black metal. It just sounds thin. The statement about my liking for the atmosphere still stands, but atmosphere and production are to different terms. You can have good atmosphere but bad guitar sound, like proven in 'Realm of Chaos'. What makes it even worse is that the instrumentation is as sloppy as it was on the debut. It was ok on 'In battle there is no law'. Due to its more extreme music the sloppiness wasn´t that much of a problem and even kind of fitted, similar to Kreator´s 'Pleasure to Kill'. On 'Realm of Chaos' the sloppiness even effects the slower parts that even end up sounding like they were played by amateurs sometimes.

There are cases where I don´t like the music, but totally get why others could like it and theefore peacefully find that it´s just not my cup of tea. With this record I can comfortably say that I don´t get it and after trying mulitple times, I don´t even want to get it anymore. The album is just boring. It is not a good album and considering its enormous status it may be the most overrated album in all of metal. I rest my case.

4/10 weak, boring