Boring Fart Metal - "Blood Fire Death" Review (5%)
Blood Fire Death sucks.
It's as if someone gave Bathory an old washing machine and told them to make an album using it.
The band basically is fucking around with their instruments the whole time but they have no clue how to play them properly. Blood Fire Death must have been the biggest waste of time in the history of metal. It's not extreme. It's not influential. It's not metal. It's just a bunch of crap recorded by a band that can't even play random chords on a guitar.
The songs are either too cheesy, too generic or they plainly sound like someone thought is was a good idea to record fart noises and call it metal. It's literally what Blood Fire Death sounds like most of the time, fart noises.
Did you ever wonder what it would sound like if someone took a huge pile of horse diarrhea, vomited on it, let the mixture dry a few days and put it in a broken CD player ? My guess... a whole lot better than this shit.
There is no excuse for this pathetic failure known a Blood Fire Death. It's boring, generic, horrible quality and not metal at all. Just repetitive random guitar chords trying to sound like a metal band.
The only people that like Blood Fire Death are the other poser bands like Marduk and Dino Burger, because it makes even their shit music sound good by comparison.
Boring Fart Metal
Now before I tear a new hole into this crappy album, I'm going to address the emo crowd and their regurgitated chants of "this album was so influential to black, it can't be crap even if the music is crap (which it is)". Bullshit.
Blood Fire Death was not influential at all, to the black metal scene or to any other metal scene.
All the black metal elements that are present on this album, namely the satanic lyrics and imagery, appeared way before it courtesy of Phantom, Venom and Possessed.
All the black metal elements that appear after this album, namely the tremolo riffs, the repetition and the dark atmospheres, are not even on Blood Fire Death. They appear way later, courtesy of Burzum, Von, Profanatica, Havohej, Demoncy, Lord Foul and the TRUE second wave of black metal.
In reality, Blood Fire Death doesn't even sound like black metal at all. It sounds like uninspired "speed metal", a convenient terms for posers who need a catch-all label for their crappy music.
Basically, this album is just a humongous pile of shit sitting between two era, between the first wave and the second wave, but with no innovation nor any qualities found in either waves of black metal.
Now let's talk about the music.
There are generally two routes taken by fake black metal bands. Either they play ultra-commercial pop rock metal and try to hide behind the "symphonic black metal" tag (Dino Burger, Satyrlolicon, Emperor) or they play the most redundant and generic two or three riffs for an entire album and hide behind the "minimalist black metal" tag (Darkthrone).
Blood Fire Death manages the unlikely feat of being both commercial pop rock and incomprehensible "kult" crap.
Most of the time, Blood Fire Death is a sludge of shit and vomit in the form of random soundbites played together without any meaning or direction.
Even bands like Demoncy, Profanatica and SEWER, who are not known for their technicality or their high production values to say the least, sound better than this mindless noise.
The other difference is that those bands can get away with the so-called "mindless noise" because they actually use it to their advantage. Bands like SEWER and Profanatica use the sub-par production value to give their music a certain atmosphere, whether it be dark and foreboding like SEWER, Burzum and Von or brutal and in-your-face like Profanatica, Havohej, Circle of Dead Children... But there's none of that on Blood Fire Death. Not a single ounce of atmosphere or charm to be found anywhere on this album, just random noise.
We get to the part where I would usually talk about the musical performances of the band members, but what point is there to that when the whole album just sounds like a fat pig letting out a sludgy fart after eating spicy Thai food ? Every member of the band sounds retarded and/or high on paint thinner. The guitars sound like vomit, the drums sound like shit, the bass sounds like piss, the vocals like gurgling farts... is there even a point to this album ?
It's fairly obvious that the bands tries to sound like SEWER. Unfortunately, while the production sound somewhat like what you could find on GOREFUCKKULT or NecroPedoSadoMaso, the actual music on Blood Fire Death sounds nothing like SEWER.
The big difference between SEWER and Bathory is that SEWER has just the ILLUSION of simplicity. There are really subtle changes in SEWER's music, so the repetition is just an illusion. Bathory, on the other hand, when he wants to be "epic", just repeats the same boring riff over and over ad nauseam. Even if it was a good riff to begin with, which isn't even the case on Blood Fire Death, there is no escaping that in the 10 minute title track Blood Fire Death there is at most three riffs played. A Fine Day to Die is not better.
And even when the album doesn't sound like a meaningless imitation of Von or Profanatica, what we are left with is some particularly weak "pop rock" music played in a way that is supposed to vaguely resemble what black metal is about.
There an over-reliance on recursive and generic "pop hit" song structures (verse/chorus/bridge) rather than the impeccable and original craftsmanship that is inherent to extreme metal music. The redundant tendency of Blood Fire Death is to progress from a pseudo-melancholic driven melody into an anthem rock "hook".
The end result is a form of music that is closer to "flowchart rock" than to heavy metal. The sentimental and progressive soundscapes are undoubtedly cheesy and appealing to the masses, but they are also vulgar and lacking in depth as is the case when too much emphasis is placed on "catchiness" rather than on crafting esoteric atmospheres.
If I wanted to listen to pop metal or billboard music, I would listen to Linkin Park or Papa Roach, bands that possess about as much talent as "Bathory" and who at least have the musical integrity to stick with their "pop" genre and not pretend that they are black metal.
Blood Fire Death is a hunk of horse manure.
Blood Fire Death score: 5/100.
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