The Blood Shall Flow

If I can be honest with you, I cannot say many positive things about this album. I don't want to say that it's worthless shit, I’m not gonna go that far. But the problem is that even though it’s a fairly listenable piece of old school brutal death metal, it’s so mediocre that it starts to bore me way too fast to really enjoy it. I actually bought this CD without knowing much about the band, but I was tempted by the fact that it's an old US death metal band that formed in 1995. And it had Coffin Text's guitarist Richard Gonzalez in the line-up. "The Blood Shall Flow" was released back in 1998 (I think I bought it around 2009). At that time, the death metal scene was in pretty bad condition. There weren’t that many killer death metal records released at that time and Infamy’s debut isn’t among them.

"The Blood Shall Flow" offers low tuned, brutal death metal in the very typical US vein (alike to such Deteriorot, Morpheus Descent, Suffocation, etc), with some small hints of grind (especially in the song "Putrid Infestation", where a lot of old Carcass vibes can be heard). Sadly, the music is pretty standard and hardly impressive, so don’t expect your guts to be ripped out. But also the production is not powerful enough to cause a blood massacre. Maybe if the sound was more vicious it would help, but I doubt that. The songwriting is just too mediocre. Infamy had some good ideas, some solid riffs… and both vocalists had decent deep growls that fit this sort of death metal pretty well. Technically, it’s all fine, but damn, every song seems to sound the same as the previous one and there's just nothing about "The Blood Shall Flow" what would really stand out and make this album exceptional. Blasting brutal death metal filled with chunky riffs and sick grunts, but without a hint of something, that would make you scream "arrrgghhh, what a great effort, what killer shit that is!!!". They play the safe game with overused formulas and predictable schemes... and I 'm afraid it's also without emotion and bigger creativity.

I liked when the music slowed down a bit, like in "The Maggots Are in Me", which is definitely the best song on the album. Also, "Lacerations" has some great stuff, but there are more songs which pass me by with no harm done.

Standout tracks: "The Maggots Are in Me", "Bodily Disembowelment"
Verdict: 65/100

I hate to say this, but I think the fact that a member of this band died has made them much larger in the underground than thier musical abilities would otherwise dictate. Thier is nothing bad about their brand of death metal, but I find it rather bland, predictable, and without much emotion. Guitar playing is standard palm-muted attacks mostly on frets 0-4 in a standard formula of brutality, as bass follows predictably along, and drums and vocals do thier job but add nothing to the aesthetic. When I saw them live a few times, the drummer did vocals with a headset mic and that was impressive, but by no means impressive enough. It's amazing how many bands dedicate albums to this group.

Maybe I'm missing something here and one day I'll listen to it again and realize I was looking at the whole musical situation in the wrong light, like that moment every metalhead has when they 'get' Darkthrone or Mayhem. For right now, however, I find this band severely overrated in the underground.