Rockfreaks.net

Bloodbound

Tabula Rasa

Written by: PP on 12/09/2009 15:37:37

I'm beginning to take a bit of a liking on Blistering Records. Almost every record they send our way is either great or has some serious potential of being so in the future, and Bloodbound's "Tabula Rasa" is no exception. Usually the heavy/power metal genre has me pulling my hair out over how generic and samey the bands in it sound, but this one is something different. The vocals might be your typical forced vibrato clean style, but somehow this dude can place enough passion and feeling behind his vocals so that they actually sound interesting. See the opening track "Sweet Dreams Of Madness" for a good example.

And then there's the instrumentals: the melodic guitar leads, the tapped riffs, the blistering solos, they all complement a solid sound that's way ahead of their peers in the power/heavy metal genre. Take "Dominion 5", for instance, which opens with a melodic death metal riff, before proceeding into slightly thrashy serpentine up-and-down riff. Think Gothenburg styled metal mixed with the epic soundscapes of power metal. Bring in a good chorus and you've got a winning track, or a whole bunch of them in fact, as you'll be hard pressed to find a single bad song on the record. I guess it did have to take a Swedish band to show the central European ones how to master their favorite genre, sort of ironic considering how everything good in metal has more or less originated in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration I know, but you get the point.

So if you're at all into hook-laden, really melodic power metal that borrows its instrumentals equally much from Gothenburg metal, then Bloodbound should be your band of choice over all the other bands in the genre. There are still some flaws on "Tabula Rasa", but they are found mostly at the later section of the album where you could suggest that the band ran out of ideas, but overall it is a solid release, and one that's meant to sound far different from their past albums from what I've read on the net.

Download: All Rights Reserved, Sweet Dreams Of Madness
For the fans of: Powerwolf, Mystic Prophecy, Chaoswave, Power Quest
Listen: Myspace

Release date 21.04.2009
Blistering Records