Depraved Goddess

Blood are an under-appreciated grindcore band from Germany who play grindcore that has a heavy death metal influence. They also seem to be influenced by Black Metal that's in the vein of (early) Impaled Nazarene, early Bathory, early Venom, Blasphemy, etc.

This release is amazing because the songs (with the exceptions of the are actually unique while retaining the same style - and, most importantly, without resorting to gimmicks (i.e., keyboard/orchestra instruments, stupid experimentations, lame samples, etc.) - the only exceptions to this is first track (appropriately entitled Intro (Zombie)) and "Wie Krieger Sterben", a track that happens to have a sample of a classical tune over some German audio clip, and then goes into the song. Why "Wie Krieger Sterben" wasn't placed at the end of the album is beyond me, but it's placement in the last quarter does nothing to harm the album.

Blood manage to avoid monotony by focusing, first and foremost, on playing good music instead of focusing on some absolutist goal such as being highly technical, fast, brutal, etc. Consequently, this release has a varierty of songs that are midpaced and those that are fast and - of course - those that combine the two. Hell, they even throw in a few numbers that are, for a grind band, slow. I can not emphasize this enough - the vast majority of tracks are good, and quite a few are excellent. At most, 4 tracks on this album are bad. At most - and that's for a 35 minute long GRIND album.

I do not give this release a rating above 90 because the metal elements on this release _greatly_ overpower the punk influences; for example, Blood emphasize good song writing over aggression, which consequently results in more cohesion and - obviously - the loss of the virulent feel of punk grind bands. While this doesn't mean fans of the more punk side of grind won't like this, they certainly won't enjoy it as much as those who are more schooled in metal.

Fans of the less-technical variety brutal death metal (i.e., Deicide's debut) will like this. Fans of grindcore like Doom will like this. Fans of early Impaled Nazarene will like this. If you like all of those, you will LOVE this album.