Artist: Bloodbound
Label: AOR Heaven Records
Released: 2006
Rating: 3.5/5
Oh my, oh my, oh my! When I first saw the band’s photo, I figured there were two bands with the same name and that I’d “surfed” onto the wrong one’s official website. But no. These guys are decked out in proper “black metal” garb, slathered in proper “corpse paint”. And what’s the name Fredrik Bergh (member of Swedish AOR purists Street Talk) doing among them? He’s gone naughty, and with Bloodbound he’s now showing off his serious talent to an audience hungry for the primal heavy metal essentials that were enthroned on European soil ages ago!
So, looks aside, the music is anything but “black metal”. It’s old-school “eighties” metal classicism through and through. The opener, Behind The Moon, is a mix of W.A.S.P.’s punchy, rhythmically open galloping and Iron Maiden’s triple-guitar melodic harmonizing. In terms of sound production, it pulls astonishingly hard toward Iron Maiden, too. Some of you listening might find yourselves thinking: “Oh yeah, where are those good old Iron Maiden these days, who long ago forgot how to dust off damn riffs à la The Trooper?!?” Anyway, from the opener on, the first five tracks are sawed off in the high gear of that ossified metal school, a blend of N.W.O.B.H.M., glam metal and, believe it or not, a touch of melodic hard rock, since we mustn’t forget that Fredrik Bergh is one of the writers of the material.
The vocals are clean and melodic! They belong to Urban Breed, otherwise the singer of Tad Morose! Dressed in a coat of backing vocal harmonies typical of melodic hard rock and AOR metal (the pompously oriented choruses of Screams In The Night and For The King). The vocal lines love to curve in the style of Bruce Dickinson, and the timbre of the voice gets close to the Iron Maiden screamer, too. What pulls toward the eighties is the lack of double bass pedals. So no one needs to worry that Bloodbound are about to go swordfighting like some Rhapsody Of Fire. Bloodbound are devoted to the classic eighties essentials, both in production and, to a good extent, in style. The solos run along the tracks of the good old Adrian Smith, surrounded by tasteful, atmospheric passages of triple-guitar harmonies. The band also brings a nice dose of pomp into the songs through the anthemic choruses! The songs carry plenty of melody and an infectious level of listenability. It’s all put together with a good feel for compact melodic punch, and wrapped in a crystal-clear production that brings the eighties back to life.
And then we get to track number seven. The seventh song is a cliché, and the first clichéd irritant on the record. It’s the Helloween-style, cheerfully pub-crawling Fallen From Grace. Whether Bloodbound wanted to use it to show they can hit the level of eighties Helloween or not doesn’t even matter. They pulled it off more than convincingly, but in that case you’re just playing covers. It’s not entirely clear whether Bloodbound sound current, but it’s a pretty silly move anyway. Cloning someone so shamelessly directly just to prove how good your technical chops are. Simply an unnecessary cliché full of major-key saccharine that unfortunately turns the listener off from the otherwise above-average quality of this release! And after that song? As if cursed! The second half of the album tilts toward the clichés of modern-day power metal, which the whole planet Earth is overflowing with these days, and that robs the album of consistency and seriousness. So we get another attack of higher cheese content in Midnight Sun, which is also shot through with typical Scandinavian-school soloing that flirts with the “baroque” elements of Malmsteen himself, proving Tomas Olsson’s technical polish. The album wraps up at a high tempo with On The Battlefield, which brings the album back to the first half, i.e. the first five tracks: an open “glam metal” galloping rhythm and “guitar riff” with a “power metal” melody laid over the top.
Bloodbound simply burn, and Nosferatu is a solid debut that landed almost exactly in the right place at the right time, and as such nearly aced the test of reviving the elements of eighties “heavy metal”. In places the band shows they’ve got some magic that convinces you, making Bloodbound recognizable despite wandering through well-chewed molds. And yet not entirely. What bothers is the far too obvious imitation of Helloween, which robs the band of its brains, so that in those spots the album is practically empty, or dry as dust. The guys know how to lay down a track that’ll send heads spinning hard around their axes. The question is how long they’ll last, because in cases like this, the follow-ups to such debuts give in to ever greater self-repetition. The Bloodbound musicians reach an excellent level of quality. Less so as songwriters, since they’re prone to imitating what’s already been invented, but they especially convince on the technical side, so they’ve got every chance to consistently build on the debut in the future and not fall into mediocrity as a parody of power metal. An album for die-hard Iron Maiden and power metal fans (without the exaggerated clattering of double bass drum pedals). For everyone else, a warning: don’t rush into it too fast, because the poisonously infectious melodicism hides plenty of clichés that can get very irritating after the second spin of “Nosferatu”.
Lineup
Urban Breed – vocals
Tomas Olsson – guitar
Fredrik Bergh – keyboards, bass guitar
Oskar Belin – drums
Production
Thomas Olsson & Fredrik Bergh
Track list
1. Behind The Moon
2. Into The Dark
3. Nosferatu
4. Metal Monster
5. Crucified
6. Desdemonamedia
7. Fallen From Grace
8. Screams In The Night
9. For The King
10. Midnight Sun
11. On The Battlefield
Album length: 53:04
