As the Rain Gently Falls (Anthology II)

I bought this CD for when I saw this band live. They’re local, so I’ve seen them more times than I can count, but I think I recall the time I bought this being not long before they released their fourth album. I almost felt like buying the record was taking pity on them or something – it was only on sale for 5 bucks, they were trying to package it together with other CDs (I seem to recall being able to buy all three full-lengths for $10, which is cheap as hell for albums with 45 minutes – 1 hour of music each), and as a whole it was very obvious the band was trying to unload tons of leftover stock from these albums’ releases…15 plus years ago. I’m guessing if you haven’t cleaned out by then it didn’t sell well in the first place (in fairness, they did have a period of inactivity). It’s strange, because I see a lot of hype surrounding these guys locally and when you see them live, it’s clear they’ve got a lot of talent and different tools in the toolbox (Jason Longo especially), but because of their confusing and sometimes counter-intuitive songwriting choices, the music is arranged into something that’s far less than the sum of its fairly solid parts. It also doesn’t help that Blood of Christ can’t pick a style and stick to it for the life of them. You can’t be black metal, slam/brutal death, OSDM, Emperor and early Ulver all at the same time, guys!

If you were able to get through the first album, Anthology II should hold no surprises, as the band hasn’t had any major shifts from their established sound, merely refinements. The production is very different, for starters – the debut had a very grainy, clearly-done-cheap-in-the-90s vibe, where it sounds like they put a bit more money into the mixing and mastering of As the Rain Gently Falls. I’m reluctant to say this given my discussion in the last paragraph, but the songwriting has improved marginally as well. Don’t get me wrong, this is still very much the same band, and the same wandering directionless songs with no beginning or end are still abundant, but at least this time the jarring shifts in the songs aren’t as jarring. That may be a partial benefit of the increased production values, as sometimes on ….a Dream to Remember some parts would be mastered louder than other parts and it added a bit more of a sudden drop to what was already a drastic change, making things even more disjointed. No, I will admit Blood of Christ focused their sound for this one, even if only a bit. There’s more weight given to the black metal influences this time around, and they’re mostly combined with chunky, turn-of-the-century death metal, like early Cryptopsy mixed with Immolation (minus the dissonance). There’s some parts that hint at melodic death metal to bridge the gap, but those are much less frequent on the sophomore, where they occupied a lot more of your brain space on the debut. They still write lots of sudden shifts mid-riff from a black metal tremolo into a pinch harmonic riff or a chug or something, but they don’t try to make every new riff an M. Night Shyamalan twist like they almost seemed compelled to do every time before. They understand that sometimes having similar riffs next to each other can move a song forward too!

This isn’t incompetent by any means, but it’s still a frustrating listen because there were so many easy ways that you could have improved this. First of all, they could cut 90% of the clean guitar sections/clean singing parts and it would DRASTICALLY improve the songs. Doesn’t matter if they’re intros, interludes or just randomly pop up for ten seconds in the middle of a song, all they had to do was just take them out and it would have made things way more listenable. Blood of Christ’s most successful songs are the ones where they don’t focus on packing too many things into a song where they don’t fit (“Blood Passion” is pretty groovy for this reason). They carefully polished a steak to make it look nicer when all they had to do was trim the fat. As such, this is a marginally more interesting listen than …a Dream to Remember because of the tweaks and fine-tunings, but the method Blood of Christ uses to write songs remains unchanged, so as a result there’s only so much that As the Rain Gently Falls can improve on.