Review Summary: It's good. You just have to sift through it to find it.
I’m thoroughly attached to this album, much like some people are still attached to old Disturbed and Korn records. It was the first album I ever bought that got anywhere close to death metal (which is my current and eternal passion) and to this day I still find a certain funny charm to it.
With Blood Comes Cleansing is deathcore. Yes, deathcore: the crappy breakdowns, the trifecta of vocal styles, everything. They’re musical style is similar to that of fellow deathcore outfit Despised Icon; a slow, almost sludgy pounding beneath Dean Atkinson’s schizoid shrieks, hardcore yells, and bestial bellows. It’s not that creative, nay, it’s not that creative at all. It’s actually quite bland, but the songwriting and Dean’s adequate vocal skills get bonus points.
There’s twelve songs on Horror, if you count the intro (aptly titled “Intro,” I might add). It’s a mix bag of hits, nicks, near-misses, and complete misses. It’s like a bag of M&M’s. You can get a normal one: tasty, but you’ve had it before. These are the “ok” tracks: Forsaken, Damnation, and Filthy Stains. They’re ok, listenable and have a head-nodding chorus or a catchy lick to their name. E.g., Forsaken’s chorus is good; it’s just too fast for half the band to handle. Dean’s vocals are great, and in the lesser tracks, they save the album from utter Armageddon.
Then there are the misfits: broken-in-half pieces of M&M’s and the shredded candy shells at the bottom of the bag. The songs that just suck so hard it puts a bad taste in your mouth about the rest of the album. The title track and Eternal Reign are just, excuse the pun, horrible. Horror would almost be a alright song- the intro and outro are perfectly rendered deathcore rants- if not for everything in the middle being just a mess of unorderly thrashing around. This round, the vocals aren’t even enough to save anything. This is just a load of The Diseased and the Poisoned outtakes.
Behold, here come the saviors of the album: the M&M’s with bonus growths off the side, or the ones where two are melded together. The ones that make you think, “Hey! Must be my lucky day,” when you pull them out of the package. These are the songs that are most worthy to grace your eardrums. Hematidrosis, Lash Upon Lash, The Suffering, Abaddon’s Horde, and Carnivorous Consumption: all examples of the best of deathcore. They’re an elite group of speedy, psycho, amped-up metalcore with a splash of death and an MPD frontman. Hematidrosis is a moshpit wonder, with blasting screams, guttural pig squeals, and thudding, dull riffs. The Suffering is actually catchy, believe it or not, and contains traces of real hardcore.
This is deathcore. That sentence alone should scare off any real metalhead that ventures near to this. For you newbies, deathcore is never a genre you want to get too far into if you want any sort of respect from true metallers. But if you really want to, when nobody’s looking, give Hematidrosis or Lash Upon Lash a good listen and enjoy the naivety of convincing yourself its real death.
