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Warhead > Bloodthunder > Reviews
Warhead - Bloodthunder

Variation successfully avoided - 44%

Pestbesmittad, December 5th, 2007

After a string of good releases it was time for the “difficult” third album for Warhead. I’m sad to say it, but “Bloodthunder” proved to be their Waterloo, a battle lost. For some reason the song writing here is so formulaic that I don’t know whether to laugh of cry. Perhaps they’ve written the material very fast, perhaps they were totally out of ideas, perhaps they were just fulfilling contractual obligations, perhaps... nah, it’s useless for me to speculate. This stuff is faster and more aggressive than “Aryan Nation’s Rebirth” but it’s also boring with a capital B, not to mention completely one-dimensional.

Let’s first have a look at the drumming. I mean, how about varying those drum patterns just a little bit from track to track? You know, just to keep it interesting for the listeners and yourselves? It may sound hard to believe, but the drummer plays exactly the same way through each and every song on “Bloodthunder”: a steady thrash/punk beat with almost no fills at all. He does use the cymbals every now and then though. This primitive and repetitive drumming style has perhaps been employed in order to give material a coherent touch, but all it does is make every song on this album sound the same. After the first three tracks you start to think “OK, so far so good but now I’d like something different”. However, you won’t get it. Warhead just keep going exactly the same way until the very last track. What I just said about the drums goes for the guitars as well: simple, typical and predictable hatecore riffs that differ only minimally from song to song. The guitar melodies that were a big part of Warhead's music before are completely missing here and this is a huge drawback. As I said earlier, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the songs on “Bloodthunder” and I got bored with this album very quickly, since nothing here sticks to my mind. The playing itself is tight but that’s the only good thing I can say about the music. Then again, many other bands play tight as well so... It’s really depressing to witness such a loss of quality from a band that previously was one of the best in the hatecore/metal genre. This release might have been more effective as a MCD (containing e.g. 4 – 5 tracks) but ten practically identical tracks is just too much. Even if the playing time is only barely 27 minutes, I still find it next to impossible to sit through this whole album due to its monotony.

The positive point on “Bloodthunder” are Knjaz’ vocals. He puts on a truly aggressive and pissed off performance and sounds very dedicated as well. Another nice detail is that the vocals are very upfront in the mix, it feels like Knjaz is yelling the lyrics right into one’s face. I think these are the best vocals on any Warhead recording so far. One is also able to understand most of the lyrics just by listening, which is cool. It’s really sad that the quality of the music doesn’t match that of the vocals, with more varied songs this album would have been really good. If there will be anymore Warhead albums, I sure hope they will return to the more varied style of their previous releases. This time they only get halfway to “88”, which means a score of 44.