Behold My Vain Sacrifice

Normally I feel a little bit bad when I have to rag on a relatively unknown band, because at the end of the day they're just trying their best at making the music they love, and I can't really fault them for that.

That being said: fuck, this sucks.

Might as well just jump into it. Almost immediately in the first track, you're met with a standard black metal rasp overlapping some delicate clean singing, and the two vocal styles really, really grate against each other right off the bat. Not a good sign to start off. Then, you realize something as the album goes on: the drums are programmed! That's not automatically a bad thing, Mare Cognitum uses a drum machine and makes it work. However, considering most of the music on here isn't particularly complicated or overwhelming and relies more on drawn out melodic doom like a (much shittier) version of Brave Murder Day, even the more minimal drum programming on here sounds pretty ill-fitting given the "archaic" vibe the rest of the music is going for. When the drums play a faster beat--and yes, it does happen a couple of times--it is insufferable. Whenever this band attempts to do anything remotely intense or black metal-inspired, it just sounds ridiculous and contrived. For some reason, if the drums are doing anything more than like 150 bpm, whoever did the programming just had to make sure the beat was something that no human could play (or would want to play, for that matter).

The easiest band to compare this to is Cradle of Filth, who use black metal as a jumping off point for a certain haunting, gothic theme. I don't enjoy Cradle of Filth much, but listening to Behold My Vain Sacrifice makes them sound like goddamn musical geniuses. Love Lies Bleeding clearly want to capture that same theatrical, diverse, maximalist vibe, but their guitarists lack the skill to play anything beyond your standard folky black metal riffs. How do you compensate for total lack of instrumental skill? Why, by writing a lot of aimless doom metal sections of course! Everyone can play doom! Behold My Vain Sacrifice certainly has a lot it needs to compensate for, and as such there are a lot of long-winded, completely baseless chords that just drift around for a little while without having any sort of connection to anything else. I want to call these sections "bridges", but that would be a misnomer because they don't actually lead you out of anything or connect to anything else--they just appear, repeat until you forgot what came before them, and then make a completely arbitrary and random transition. It's either that, or the keyboards just do a standalone thing (maybe throw some of that operatic singing overtop), and that's when the album gets downright stupid. this band seems to think they're creating a beautiful and delicate narrative, but they really just make me feel like I'm at the world's shittiest renaissance faire.

Now, it doesn't take long before you realize you're not listening to particularly skilled musicians, but I've seen bands overcome that. You can get away with not having a particularly high amount of skill by making creative and unusual melody and songwriting choices, and just writing and playing to your strengths. Of course, Love Lies Bleeding do not do any of those things. They try a bunch of different styles, from black metal to melodic doom to folk to symphonic metal and NONE of it works the way it should. The way they structure their songs makes absolutely no fucking sense, they have awkward and uncomfortable transitions CONSTANTLY, which should not be the case for music this longwinded and atmosphere-focused. All of these songs are over ten minutes long! They never fucking end! Everything about this is just really, really bad, and the worst part is you have to sit through it for fifty fucking minutes! Actually, I guess it's not fifty minutes of music, because the final track has a long silent pause before some pointless ambiance closes things out. Normally I hate it when bands do that, but I actually find myself relieved when the silence kicks in because it means I don't have to listen to this piece of shit anymore!

Even the parts of this album that don't make me cringe have something holding them back. A half decent tremolo riff will be drenched in horrible, cheap-sounding keyboards, the clean singing is decent but can't do anything to salvage an album that's this far gone, and Love Lies Bleeding do this thing where they have the harsh vocalist singing simultaneously with her a lot and it just sounds fucking BAD. Like, did no one at any point in the recording process stop and think to themselves that maybe these ideas don't fucking work? The drum machine, the awful keyboards, the confusing and pointless songwriting changes...I just don't see how no one among the band members had a problem with this soup of shit. This isn't even comically bad like Spermswamp or The Shaggs or something where at least you can show it to your friends and have a good laugh for a couple of minutes. No, this is just shit, with very, very few redeeming qualities, and because of the seriousness and pretension it's drenched in there is absolutely no reason for you to listen to this. The only thing that's funny about this album is that I bought it used, which means that someone out there actually paid full price for this, and that is hilarious. I only paid three bucks for this and I still feel ripped off. Hell, I'd feel ripped off even if the store paid me to take the album. (Remember, kids, listen to albums before you purchase them.)

For all I know, maybe this band did a complete 180 and got really good later in their career and they were just ironing out the kinks on Behold My Vain Sacrifice, because this is just their debut. I'm sure as shit not gonna waste my time finding that out, though. Avoid this album. I beg you. I promise it's not even bad in an interesting way, you've already spent more time on this band than you ever should have in your life by reading this review, just get out and never look back.

Dear god, this album has been re-pressed twice? Who the fuck listens to this?

A lot of people claim its hard to find black metal that isn’t subjected to clichés or generic instrumentation, but I find this declaration to be largely unfair and untrue. There are a number of bands who use the black metal style to express their ideologies and lyrical themes by using excessive experimentation. To a degree, this French band, Love Lies Bleeding, are one of those. ‘Behold My Vain Sacrifice’ is where it all began for Love Lies Bleeding, a band who seem to have a strong enough fan base, but still not enough recognition to allow them to expand their illustrious career beyond the realms of just having a set of loyal followers. In many ways, the Metal Archives Review Challenge is essential to these bands, who remain unnoticed despite having a small band of strong supporters, because it allows the band to become exposed to a greater plain of listeners, people who may pick up on this band by sheer chance, much like I did. ‘Behold My Vain Sacrifice’ isn’t where I started with Love Lies Bleeding, but is where I will begin reviewing from, which makes sense since it’s the first full-length. With ties to bands like Corpus Christii, Hell Militia and Secrets Of The Moon, the influences upon the atmospherics are varied and thus manage to make the music interesting on this basis alone, which differs from a large amount of black metal bands.

This prominent French act have been circulating around the underground since 1996, which is just incredible. The French scene is often considered the most inspired, with bands like Alcest (formally black metal at least) and other notable bands opening up the genre and sub-genres of the French scene . Bands like this carve through the traditional elements and establish a firm sense of nationality to the local bands. French bands, in my opinion, are often considered to be, on the whole, the raw side of black metal. Love Lies Bleeding do not fit into this, or most other types of stereotype when it comes to placing them within a certain sub-genre or brand which we can use to distinguish them by. According to the genre tag, Metal Archives users consider this act to be an atmospheric black metal band with elements of doom incorporated into their themes. To me, this record isn’t as straight forward as that. Why? Because the band utilises a number of differing experimental ways to portray their lyrical themes which range from desperation, lamentations and loneliness, perhaps traditional themes. The lyrics themselves are decent, but not great. The rasps don’t really allow them to become accessible to the listener unless you read them, which is usually the case anyway. The lyrics range from English to French and express the sadness that the lyrical themes suggest they do.

“She had the darkest smile but tears in her eyes.
Delighted in sadness...Sad in happiness.
The egoistic despair she felt,
The tragic irony I saw in her soul.
Enslaved by her fate, she knew her end.”

As previously stated, the instrumentation isn’t portrayed all that traditionally. Of course, there are the occasional blast beats of double bass from the drums, the odd tremolo here or there and, obviously, rasping vocals which portray the essence of black metal and have done since the dawn of its creation. These sides to Love Lies Bleeding aren’t as accessible or approachable, but do portray a necessary output. These sides to their instrumentation are used to compliment the splendor of the supreme melodies created by the programming and keyboards. Although formulated, they serve a distinct purpose, portraying the negative aspects of the ideologies, whilst the seemingly folk-inspired side expresses different content altogether. However, Love Lies Bleeding are about a bit more than that. Each song, from ‘The Lady Who Didn't Want To Be’ with its use of expressive keyboards and female vocals, to ‘The Flowers Of Nevermore’ which use divine symphonic soundscapes which exclusively express a subtle sadness and conjure images of epic battles, or sublime landscapes, these are generated by the keyboards (which are pivotal to the French band). Elements like these lead one to believe that this band are experimental in their approach, using medieval sounding instrumentation to explore folk inspired themes. The sounds of acoustics and flutes, perhaps created by the keyboards or programming and the attractive clean female/male vocals (which lean towards the operatic) distinguish the first side of Love Lies Bleeding from the second. A significant influence from the bass would have been nice, but isn’t essential. The instrumentation is projected over a clear production and is interesting enough to merit credit.