Vomitory-Blood Rapture

I’ve been listening to this album for a few years now and I’ve always thought the same thing about it: can death metal get any purer than this? I discovered these guys at the same time I dug up Fleshgod Apocalypse, Dark Lunacy, Mortician, and Hate Eternal. It was on this stupid website that isn’t around anymore, but I’m glad I found those bands. When I want to show someone what pure death metal sounds like, one of the bands that I’ll end up playing for them is Vomitory. And for a plain death metal album, it’s not that bad at all. And that’s kind of unusual for me to say because the thing about a band that always grabs me is if their creative and progressive with their music, instead of sticking to pure tradition.

The first thing I would like to note about this album is that the guitar distortions are very clean and smooth, as opposed to the crunchy distortions on Carnage Euphoria. Most of the album checks out pretty well. None of the instruments are overpowering and drowning everything else out, the bands is relatively tight but it could use some work. I like the deep growls, except they sound a tad bit too relaxed, so they could use to be more powerful. I love the way they have the drums tuned on this album. The drums have a really clicky sound, but there’s bass in the drums so it’s not all high-pitched and annoying like it is on some metal records. The guitar solos are a little too simple for my taste, but luckily they fix that up in Carnage Euphoria. And the drums are kind of overtechnicallizing the other instruments (I just invented my own word). In other words, the drums are really technical, but everything else is pretty simple, and it doesn’t really fit. But other than those minor faults, Blood Rapture checks out just fine.

This is one of the albums where I haven’t paid any attention to the song names. I just put this album on shuffle and listen to it straight through. But I did pick out a couple of song names so that I could point something out that bothers me. You can’t hear the bass in some of the songs; it’s just not loud enough. Two of those songs would be Rotting Hill and Hollow Retribution. And I don’t know how many of you out there pay much attention to what the bassist is playing, but I naturally hear what the bassist is playing because I play the bass myself. This happens to all musicians, when they listen to a recording that’s not theirs, the instrument that the musician play just naturally stands out to them. It’s actually kind of weird because before I started playing bass almost 4 years ago, I didn’t really hear what the bassist was playing unless he was doing a solo or something (like in Good Times Bad Times by Led Zeppelin). So this album is pure death metal, nothing else. This gets a 16/20.