BLEEDING THROUGH
Nine
Sharptone Records
Have to admit that genre-straddling metallers BLEEDING THROUGH fell off my radar screen after a solid run in the early aughts, capped by 2008's rather brilliant Declaration. I even recall seeing the band hold its own opening for Marilyn Manson and SLAYER, on the Christ Illusion tour I think. But I didn't realize the band was still around - nor had I given it much thought - until the promo for its aptly titled ninth album Nine showed up in my inbox a few weeks back.
Even then, I was thinking it was some sort of comeback album. But after reading through the accompanying bio and doing a quick search on the Googles, turns out BLEEDING THROUGH's last album, 2018's Love Will Kill All, was actually its comeback album - following a short breakup. And there was the three-song EP Rage after that.
Anyway, here we are. And despite a sometimes fraught 25-year-ish career - punctuated by spectacular, caught-on-tape van crashes, label disputes, lineup churn, outlier status and the aforementioned year-long split - BLEEDING THROUGH shows no shortage of moxie here.
Nine mashes up metalcore belligerence, black metal fury and grace and deathcore beatdowns, all tempered - a bit too much, I would argue - by generous melodic flourishes. It is an often punishing, noisy effort, boasting a wall of sound, attack dog approach that carries over from the sextet's work with Mick Kenney of ANAAL NATHRAKH on its previous three releases, which I have subsequently scrambled to check out as a point of reference.
Guitarists John Arnold and Brandon Richter deliver a veritable cascade of crunch as they whip-saw from fleet black metal trems and thrashy riffs to bludgeoning 'core grooves while riding drummer Derek Youngsma's pummeling drums. Atop if all is the full-throated, 'roid rage roar of frontman Brandan Schieppati, who sounds like he's about to burst an artery. "Fuck with us and find out," he dares on "Our Brand Is Chaos", while later on declaring on "War Time": "I have become your enemy". Believe it.
Nine is at its best when the band is at its most intense. The album gets off to a rousing start with one banger after another in the blackened stormer "Gallows", the heaving "Our Brand Is Chaos", "Dead But So Alive" and "Hail Destruction", which is slower and more brooding than the others but adds an industrial-like clamor a la ANAAL NATHRAKH, as noted above. "Dead But So Alive" boasts clean sung choruses, but maintains its intensity, nevertheless.
The same, however, does not hold true elsewhere. "Lost In Isolation" offers KILLSWITCH ENGAGE-like anthemics and heft softened by clean/poppy choruses, yet even with nifty power metal lead tradeoffs it's pretty much stock metalcore, and thus nothing special. Ditto the more melodic, keyboard-laden "Emery".
Marginally better is the similarly KILLSWITCH-y "Path Of Our Disease" - with keyboardist Marta Demmel featured prominently on vocals - thanks to its pounding, yet quite catchy, "I don't care ..." shout-along chorus. But the weird pop punk meets thrash meets symphonic black metal of "I Am The Resistance" stumbles over is puzzling direction and COMEBACK KID frontman Andrew Neufeld's whiny cleans.
The bruising "War Time", with its blackened fury and quaking breakdown, is offset by more rote cleans - with Brian Fair from SHADOWS FALL chiming in here - that steal its thunder. Dirty vocals the whole way through would have made it the full-on powerhouse it could have been. The blistering "Unholy Armada" does close things out with a bang, but after all the intrusive "warbling" that came before it, I found myself waiting for that inevitability again here. Fortunately, that did not come to pass, and Schieppati's bug-eyed holler ruled the day.
So Nine is definitely hit or miss. BLEEDING THROUGH delivers some very effective fire-breathing brutality here yet is hamstrung by the abundance of superfluous cleans and sometimes patchwork compositions. And for a band that long has struggled to really break through, I'm not sure how much this will help.
3.0 Out Of 5.0
