Most of you know the story about
Bloodbath, they are a side-project of some of Sweden's most hard working men in the death metal scene. This side project is rooted in the members’ ideas and interests of making music where all of them once started their careers with, death metal. They come from bands like notorious
Opeth, legendary
Edge Of Sanity,
Katatonia and
Hypocrisy among others. Super group or not, the band know how to play death metal and they do it with ease. Brutal and extremely forceful death metal is what
Bloodbath is all about. They have yet released three full-lengths, two EP's and one live album,
The Wacken Carnage. After the release of the latest EP I couldn't wait to hear how the new album would sound like. My expectations was very high when
The Fathomless Mastery was released on the market. I had no idea how this album would sound like but I knew that it was going to have some similarities to the EP. As soon as I noticed that this was available on the internet, I bought it and I immediately began to listen. The power of disappointment struck me harder more than ever.
The Fathomless Mastery is without a doubt a pure death metal album, featuring dark growls, fast picked tremolo and power-chord guitars and of course blast-beat fury. The problem is that this doesn't sound like
Bloodbath. Mikael Akerfeldt's vocals are terrible compared to the
Ressurection Through Carnage. Even if the
Resurrection Through Carnage was quite repetitive,
The Fathomless Mastery became even more repetitive . I'm not saying that the band has taken a new direction from their original style but everything sounds so re-hashed and uninspired. Akerfeldt's sharp beast growls are now just a murky mush, he's unique growls has deteriorated a lot in this album. Another thing that
Bloodbath has failed to achieve is the variation of tracks. If you compare this to
Nightmares Made Flesh you will notice that this album is very repetitive. Most tracks have different intros but as the songs progresses you can hear that both guitars and drums starts to sound similar to the other tracks. I was hoping to have some slow moving tracks mixed with some hyper-fast stuff, something that would make the songs to stick out more. This time everything became more or less the same; there are hardly any noticeable or memorable melodies in this album. The only songs that I enjoy are
Earthrot and
Drink From The Cup Of Heresy. Those two tracks are the only ones that contains some of
Bloodbath’s trademarks. Like the unpleasant atmospheres and the dark down-tuned riff sections.
Bloodbath has always used some small portions of melodies in their material, most of the time the melodies have been memorable ones, but this time they aren’t. And thanks to Akerfeldt's limited vocal diversity most songs gets quite stiff and simply boring. This time I wished that Akerfeldt could've stayed with his beloved
Opeth and a new vocalist would've been added. Hell, even Dan Swano could've been a more capable or even better vocal-replacement.
One of my favourite death metal bands disappointed me a lot this time and I hate to say that. They even decided to mix their music with
Meshuggah influences. Just listen to
Iesous,
Mock The Cross and
Devouring The Feeble. Only
Meshuggah uses those kinds of chunky riff moments and it doesn’t mix well with this type of death metal. I think personally that the replacing Dan Swano with an unknown guitarist was a mistake, even guitarists like Ola Lindgren from
Grave could've been better. They should’ve taken a guy with more experience under his belt. All the riff lines contains more or less black metal-ish tremolo picking patterns and the unusually overuse of blast-beats has transformed
Bloodbath into something else that doesn't sounds like the real
Bloodbath. Good or bad, that's for you to decide. I was expecting a record that maybe would sound like a mix between the earlier albums, but instead it became an album that sounds more like the
Unblessing The Purity EP x 4.
Nightmares Made Flesh will still remain as their greatest achievement. Everything that I liked from the previous albums does not exist in this one. I liked the gory, filthy, dark and unpleasant things that surrounded the bands previous material but this time the music felt completely mediocre. Few people will agree with me but this is how I feel about this album, I still love the band but at this time I think that
The Fathomless Mastery should be called ''The Worthless Wankery''.
Positives
+ The band is still active and healthy
+ Professional death metal
Negatives
- This is even more repetitive than Resurrection Through Carnage
- Akerfeldt's growls doesn't impress me this time
- To much blast-beats and tremolo pickings
- Completely unoriginal material compared to their previous albums
Recommended Tracks
-- Earhrot
-- Drink From The Cup Of Heresy
Final rating will be a 2/5.
