Blood
A potent hybrid of thrash, grind/death and brutal pounding black metal, Blood are a classic of the underground for experiments in violent minimalism.
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Production: Varying types of demo and garage sound.
Review: Most of grindcore in an effort to be profound and through equalization of reaction to inflection has forgotten the fundamentalist absurdism that makes this genre more than complaints so fervent they have become incoherent; Blood, like Blasphemy, recapture this spirit through a metal-tinged airburst meted out in staccato spurts of blasting, gurgling, roaring mayhem. Their distinctiveness comes from the tendency to do so with epic topics distilled into concrete examples from biology, philosophy and the occult, creating like Dead Infection an anecdotal metaphor but in a postmodern style which, like the novels giving that name to a genre, unite disparate disciplines around common abstract themes.
Released together on CD, these early works capture the essence of that spirit even if the mechanics remain unrefined and in doing so gives us a window into the formative drive behind the bizarre and ironically deconstructive music. Like early Napalm Death, these songs are an extension of punk to incorporate the more facile structural vocabulary of metal, while aesthetically communicating a sense of extremity and incoherence borne of an inability to reach an audience who, while they can be taught political or moral concepts to repeat in bleating synchronicity, cannot grasp the essence of the situation because they do not take it seriously. Grindcore was a revolution against all rock music, and "Impulse to Destroy" distances the listener from that style while using the techniques of rock music to make sonic rage peaking off the scale.
That is not to say that, like grindcore two years past its formation, this music is one-dimensional -- on the contrary, what makes this and Blasphemy a hybrid of grindcore and epic, black/death metal is its ability to grasp different concepts and moods, from choleric futility to sociopathic melancholy and beyond, and unite them in a worldview in which abstract forms are harmonized across origins. In that sense, the lyrics like the music are pure psychological symbolism arising from the shape of a riff, the texture of voices, or the casual jigsaw that fits together disparate riffs into sentential meaning. From a distance, it is indistinguishable from normal grindcore, but after examination that is the last mistake an experienced listener would make with the music of Blood.
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Production: Turgid churning darkness, very bass intense and capturing rough edges of power chords in a massively present foundation but often distant tone.
Review: Blasting power grindcore hybrid bears the darkness and ambient rolling riff chaos of a black metal band into charging and violent music revealing the subconscious primitivism and regression in human thinking. Dustencrusted throat turbulence mars the percussiveness of perfectly rigid collision riffs, but underneath the conflict move unfolding classically European melodies with a hint of mideval music in their trenchant cyclic emphasis on returning to a stable state.
With rigid and vast low-end vocal percussion accenting the seemingly paradoxical drumming style of thrash music Blood thrust forward their songs at an epic clip of attention, despite the detours of tempo and simple riff variation to provide chorus of bridge. Blasting accumulative violence serves often to connect songs with driving simplifications of major themes to hurl obscurity at the listener like a puking angel. As individual instruments, musical voices are single and repetitive but when placed together they function like an ocean of pinwheels, reflecting a chaos representing many iterations of the same order.
1. Intro 1:28
2. Kadath 2:16
3. Cannibal Ritual 1:43
4. Profanity 0:45
5. Submission 2:51 (intro 0:33)
6. Sodomize the Weak 1:18
7. Punishment 2:48
8. Christbait 1:14
9. Dread 1:48 (intro 0:10)
10. Wings of declaration 0:33
11. By the way of grace 2:10
12. God left the world 0:38
13. (Instrumental) 0:27
14. Revelation 0:56
15. Divine seed 2:45
16. Spasmoparalytic dreams 1:55 (intro 0:08)
17. Lamentation 3:01
18. Stream of anguish 1:21
19. Blood for blood 1:38 (intro 0:05)
20. Outro 0:33
Length: 32:10
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Copyright © 1994 1MF
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Song structures evolve to allow intrusive chaos to create momentum refreshed by the the underlying violent conflicts holding this music together, bonding simple elements of song into substructures for assembly. The sensation in the mind of the listener is often similar to that of someone pursued down a maze with many possible pathways, always switching attention to explore a new option or return to a discovered pattern. The abusive thrash of this approach ratifies the hybrid core of this music.
In its obsession with violence and conflict, but insistence upon moments of lucidity to unfold the content of each song, the music of Blood asserts the philosophy of black metal in its postmodern revelations from the obscure, but in its tactical practicionership of destruction Blood is the product of DRI-style thrash and thundering metallic death like Master, Baphomet or Carcass. Aesthetics and imagery fill more of a black metal conceptual role, with topics and techniques in lyric writing similar to those of Dead Infection from Poland.
The same broad simplicity that allows comparisons to death metal and grindcore also outline the black metal heritage behind the ambiguous and often mocking riffs in this music. Often deliberately simplistic-sounding and harmonically offensive or ridiculous, these riffs appear early in songs before the melody has come forth in its darkness and dissonant ambiguity under otherwise definitive, strongly expressed chords in a rhythmic code of downstrumming. Hybrid as this nature is it brings a paradoxical, beautiful spirit to deliberately ugly and violent music.
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1. Intro (Zombia)
2. Roman whores
3. Enthanastic inclination
4. Blasphemy
5. Die Leiche
6. Bloody Season
7. The god you save
8. Unholy god
9. Dark conscience
10. Wage war
11. Bastard son
12. Maggotstorm
13. Christian Holocaust
14. Wie Krieger sterben
15. Fuck Religions
16. Destroy command
17. Fleshhanger (cannibal ritual II)
18. Sinner Knell
19. Execution
20. A burial place
21. An orgy of blood at forest morgue
Length: 35:58
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Depraved Goddess (Blood)
The German grind machine continues its onslaught of mythologically symbolic but apocalyptically earthy conflict in which the icons of modern time are turned into the fears of a nightmare and hallucination through the power of elemental music with chortling blast of rapid blasts of distorted chord. Where most grindcore achieves an uncomfortable level of political or social reality in its music, Blood use some of the technique and sensibilities of black metal to invent a subconscious journey in the visions of the primitive survival-oriented parts of the mind. Gurgling vocals over roaring chord descents and a jubilant bouncing swagger behind verses describing the "or worse" in almost any situation, with guitar contributing an even third of the dialogue with a series of tonal focal points and shaped patterns for riffs and rhythm playing around each point. The shifting of focus raises the level of concentration from the pattern itself to the change in overall perception resulting from the opposite or retrograde motion of two patterns, and in this neurosis of perception Blood achieve a suspension of demands for mainstream reality to regulate cognitive faculties. In the "Depraved Goddess" incarnation of this process, Blood fill out the broader form they carved for themselves on "Christbait," and the result is a highly listenable but still disturbed version of this sonic commando unit.
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1. Intro (1:51)
2. Screaming With No Face (1:19)
3. Flames and Gas (1:35)
4. Auto Cannibalism (1:55)
5. Ebola (1:23)
6. Perishment in Utter Ecstasy (1:48)
7. Defaced Total Mutation (1:02)
8. 2011 (0:06)
9. Der Henker (2:48)
10. Fleshconsumer (1:01)
11. Multiglobalised Fallacy (1:20)
12. Derangement (2:34)
13. Woundead (0:41)
14. FH-70mm (1:20)
15. Holy Rot (1:48)
16. Mankind (1:16)
17. Serial Infanticide (2:16)
18. Amputation (1:23)
19. Hecatomb (1:41)
20. Positional Warfare (2:13)
Length: 31:22
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Gas, Flames, Bones (Rough Trade)
The return of greater obscurity to the music of Blood takes place on this standard production album with a penchant for tightening songs around rhythms, but an equal ability to allow some of its more ambitious moments to dissipate in its quest for the ongoing growth of the nightmare grind album. Where previous works had attempted to inject space into songs, the playing here seems almost designed to cram more texture and iteration frequencies of riff recombinations which advance the temporal divisions of the perceptive horizon by forcing the mind to perceive and classify events more quickly. Many parts of this work are enigmatic in a dark simplicity and a coherence more chaotic enough than any known method that it merits a separate classification. Often a song will rotate in pure rhythm until a throttling of two chords in textural patterns forces an explication of inward strife and reduction to a semi-melodic charging lead sequence. Songs capture atmosphere, and this album as a whole while fractured offers an insight into the surpressed iconography behind the bizarre fearful visions of a normal daily existence.
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BLACK | DEATH | HEAVY | SPEED | THRASH | GRINDCORE
Copyright © 1988-2004 the Dark Legions Archive
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