BLEEDING THROUGH – NINE

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Feb 172025
 

(Andy Synn continues his murderous, on-off, love affair with OC Metalcore crew Bleeding Through)

It’s entirely appropriate that the cover for Bleeding Through‘s new album features a solitary figure standing at a crossroads… because that’s pretty much where Bleeding Through have stood their entire career.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a fan of the band for a long time – I think it was their seminal second album, Portrait of the Goddess, which first brought them to my attention, right before they had their big breakthrough with 2003’s This Is Love, This Is Murderous – but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to their flaws.

In particular they’ve always seemed torn between two competing urges – whether to double down on the more blisteringly aggressive and abrasively “blackened” side of their sound (as they did to such great effect prior to their hiatus with their 2010 self-titled and 2012’s blazing The Great Fire) or to take the poppier (and, inevitably, more popular) path by following in the footsteps of some of their more radio-friendly peers (as they did in the aftermath of This Is Love…’s unexpected success).

Their 2018 comeback album, Love Will Kill All found them trying to split the difference (which, to be clear, doesn’t have to be a bad thing) but ultimately resulted in a rather compromised record that didn’t leave much of an impression, and since then the only real insight into the band’s musical direction has been 2022’s Rage EP… all of which means there’s a lot of questions, and a lot of expectations, to be answered by NINE.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY (15 BANDS, 16 SONGS)

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 212024
 

(written by Islander)

Yesterday morning my fellow NCS slave DGR sent me the names of 11 bands whose new songs he thought would make good fodder for this Saturday roundup. That was on top of more than a dozen new songs and videos I had on my own list. What to do?

Putting two dozen new tracks into this roundup seemed excessive, if not for you then certainly for me. That’s just way too much work. I thought about just embedding all the streams, without any further info or my own priceless commentary. I even thought about asking someone who’s on Spotify (which I am not) to make a playlist of all the songs and sticking that in here, which would have been an even lazier strategem.

I figured out a solution. It’s not a great solution, just a compromise, and like all compromises it leaves the contending parties unhappy (the contending parties here being two argumentative parts of my brain).

The songs below are alphabetized by the name of the band that made them — another lazy strategem, but one that has resulted in some amusing and interesting contrasts and complements. Nostalgia had something to do with some of these picks (that will be obvious when you come to them). This collection also includes more than a few exceptions to our “rule” about vocals and some curveballs that dive outside our usual strike-zone (sometimes at the same time). Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: BLEEDING THROUGH — “RAGE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 042022
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new EP by Orange County’s Bleeding Through, their first new music in four years and out now on Sharptone Records.)

The fact that this site’s roots grew out of an in-joke born from early-aughts metalcore is always an amusing one, especially given the many pathways into things way, way heavier that we’ve taken in the decade-plus since. Yet we – and especially yours truly – would be lying if we said we didn’t still have a soft spot for a lot of those bands. That was partially why we found ourselves so oddly interested in the resurgence of MTV2 Headbanger’s Ball-era dominating bands beginning a few years ago as a lot of them decided that would be the time within the nostalgia cycle to mark their returns.

A few of those releases were legitimately good – we’ll still go to bat for The Agony Scene’s Tormentor release – and the rest at the very least were solid returns to what you’d always expect for that style of band. Bleeding Through‘s 2018 album Love Will Kill All somewhat stradled the line between the two, wherein there were a handful of truly ferocious and jaw dropping songs but also many other that sounded like Bleeding Through getting used to being Bleeding Through again.

They played what they’ve always done, and weirdly enough it made Love Will Kill All play out like an unintentional career retrospective…run backwards. It started out with their blisteringly fast and heavily chugged-out death metal leanings that colored their later releases and slowly became the more brawny and breakdown-filled style that made them a hallmark of the early 2000s. It was a weird dynamic for sure, but also one that made it perplexing to know what Bleeding Through‘s gameplan was for the future. Continue reading »

WHAT YEAR IS IT?! NEW STUFF FROM INTO ETERNITY, UNEARTH, BLEEDING THROUGH, JOURNAL, JACK KETCH, SILENT CIVILIAN (ON THE WAY), AND MUNICIPAL WASTE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 032018
 

 

This is a SEEN AND HEARD round-up that’s going under a different name today. If the reason for that isn’t already obvious from the title of this post, let me explain:

Below you will find new songs and one new video, plus a news item, from seven bands. One of them is by a band whose last release was 10 years ago. Three are from bands whose last albums came out eight years ago. Two more are by bands whose last albums were released six and four years ago, respectively. And the video for the last one is set in a time when if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you went to the VHS store.

I can’t take credit for the Robin Williams–Jumanji meme or the post title. That was suggested by DGR, and actually it was he (with an assist from Andy Synn) who foisted all these new songs and videos on me. Basically, today I’m just a marionette whose strings are being pulled by others. Let’s get this over with so I can go back to listening to really disgusting death and black metal. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 50: BLEEDING THROUGH

 THE SYNN REPORT  3 Responses »
Aug 262014
 

 

(Andy Synn celebrates the 50th edition of his SYNN REPORT by reviewing the discography of the late Bleeding Through from Orange County, CA.)

 

Recommended for fans of: Vader, Anaal Nathrakh, Earth Crisis

So this is kind of a big deal, right? 50 editions (not counting special editions or catch-up features) of my inane ramblings about bands you may or may not like, without so much as a protest or petition calling for me to be fired. It’s practically a miracle I tell you.

I chose Bleeding Through for the singular honour of being the fiftieth recipient of The Synn Report because a) the band recently played their final show, and I wanted to commemorate that, and b) they’ve been one of my favourites ever since I first discovered them.

And also because it’s my column, so I get to pick the bands.

Now I know many of you will have been put off by the “metalcore” tag so frequently applied to the band, and their unfortunate association with the more commercially inclined members of that movement, but honestly, a lot of their material is both legitimately heavy and uncompromisingly brutal – a mix of blistering blast-beats and bruising break-downs, crushing riffs, creeping keys, and caustic screams – taking in a much wider variety of influences than many of their peers.

With elements and influences drawn from everyone from Emperor to Earth Crisis to Exodus, the band’s sound mixes many of the best bits of Death, Thrash, and Black Metal with the uncompromising intensity and integrity of Hardcore at its most primal and primitive.

After the jump you’ll find a selection of the band’s heaviest, most metallically devastating tracks, in the hope of convincing some of you to give these underrated underdogs another chance! Continue reading »

BLEEDING THROUGH — GOODBYE TO DEATH

 Concert Reviews  8 Responses »
Apr 232013
 

(In this post Andy Synn reviews the final UK performance of Orange County’s Bleeding Through and provides his own very personal farewell to the band.)

So on Sunday, 21st of April, Bleeding Through played their final show in the UK. I was originally meant to be heading down to their London show on the Friday, but ended up spending the evening mildly hallucinating from some random illness I picked up, and so came close to missing the band entirely. Thankfully, although I wasn’t 100% by Sunday I was at least able to drag myself out and catch the band, performing the final date of this, their last-ever UK/Euro tour.

Now I realise some of you probably don’t like Bleeding Through, and whether that’s through a sincere dislike of what they do or because you simply wrote them off a long time ago, that’s ok. But I’ve been a fan for a long time now, ever since 2002’s Portrait Of The Goddess (I’m afraid I didn’t get in on the ground floor with Dust To Ashes, which probably makes me some kind of poser), and the announcement of the band’s impending dissolution definitely had me down in the doldrums.

So what I’m going to do here is to give my impressions of the gig, intercut with some video footage, followed by some final thoughts and feelings inspired by seeing the band for the very last time. Continue reading »

BLEEDING THROUGH: “THE GREAT FIRE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 062012
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album from Orange County’s Bleeding Through, which is out now on Rise Records.)

Anyone who was around when the metalcore explosion was happening and followed its development should know who Bleeding Through are.  Their revolutionary (and unmatched to this day) combination of hardcore brawn, black metal venom, thrash metal fanaticism, and death metal brutality — all with symphonic overlays courtesy of the only female keyboardist in metal worth a living fuck — has yet to get old for me.

I remember when people were pronouncing Bleeding Through’s demise when founding guitarist Scott Danough left the band after The Truth and thought they would start sucking, but Bleeding Through has been proving everyone wrong ever since, writing their best material on their last two albums, Declaration (2008) and Bleeding Through (2010), which showed that Scott apparently didn’t have much to do with the song-writing process at all.  So what’s the verdict on this band’s new album The Great Fire?

This is their most brutal yet most experimental effort yet.

This is a much faster, much more visceral and frantic Bleeding Through than we’ve ever heard before.  At the same time, this is also the oddest Bleeding Through, mainly due to Marta Peterson’s new-found sense of adventurism in the keyboard and symphonic department.  Adding instruments and sounds that were begging to be incorporated into Bleeding Through’s music — organs, harpsichords, fucking electronic-as-all-get-out pad sounds that are lo-fi as shit — she has helped create a much more blackened atmosphere than has been heard before. Continue reading »

MORE 2011 SICKNESS (Part 12)

 Forthcoming Albums  17 Responses »
Dec 022011
 

November is done, and the countdown begins to the end of 2011 and he beginning of the New Year. We’ve been so focused this week on the year behind us, since 2011 Listmania is now in full swing, that we almost forgot that there is a future, and it will be filled with metal.

So, here’s the deal:  In these METAL IN THE FORGE posts, we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month (November) about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — THIS ISN’T A CUMULATIVE LIST. If we found out about a new forthcoming album before November, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier.

This month’s list begins right after the jump. As usual, this list is half-assed rather than comprehensive. So, feel free to leave Comments and tell all of us what we missed when we put this list together. Let us know about albums on the way that  you’re stoked about! Continue reading »

MORE 2010 SICKNESS (Part 2)

 Forthcoming Albums, Listmania, Metal News  No Responses »
Feb 232010
 

We’re now almost two months into 2010, and it’s already time for our second update to the list of forthcoming new albums we posted on January 1.  (See the original list here and the first update here.) Below is a list of still more projected new releases that we didn’t know about on January 1 or at the time of our last update about a month ago — and there’s a lot of them.

Once again, we’ve cobbled together news blurbs about bands whose past work we’ve liked, or who look interesting for other reasons. Needless to say (but we’ll say it anyway), these are bands that mostly fit the profile of music we cover on this site.

So, in alphabetical order, here’s our list of cut-and-pasted blurbs from various sources over the last month about forthcoming new releases:

1349: “Prosthetic Records will release the brand new album from Norwegian black metal legends 1349 in North America via an agreement with Indie Recordings. The new CD, which promises ‘a return to the band’s more traditional, raw-yet-technical black metal sound,’ is due on April 13. In support of the yet-to-be-titled record, 1349 will embark on a North American tour in April and May as the support act for CANNIBAL CORPSE (alongside SKELETONWITCH and LECHEROUS NOCTURNE).”

ABACABB: “ABACABB are currently out on the road headlining the Hot Dice On Black Ice Tour featuring Upon A Burning Body!. The tour just hit Texas and will be in California this weekend. Following the tour ABACABB will enter the studio with producer Will Putney at Machine Shop in New Jersey and will have a new album to be released sometime this summer.”

AEON: “Swedish death metallers AEON have set Path Of Fire as the title of their third album, due later in the year via Metal Blade Records. The CD was recorded in September 2009 at Empire Studio in Östersund, Sweden and was mixed the following month at Mana Recording Studios in St, Petersburg, Florida by Erik Rutan (HATE ETERNAL, MORBID ANGEL, CANNIBAL CORPSE). The mastering was handled by Alan Douches at West West Side Music (CONVERGE, HATEBREED, THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN) in New Windsor, New York.”

AMORPHIS: “AMORPHIS will release its first-ever live DVD, Forging The Land Of Thousand Lakes, in early June via Nuclear Blast, in time for the band’s 20th anniversary. The filming took place on November 20, 2009 at Club Teatria in Oulu, Finland, where AMORPHIS was supported by STRATOVARIUS and BEFORE THE DAWN. In addition to the full-length live show, the anniversary DVD will include plenty of bonus material documenting the band’s impressive career.”   (much more after the jump . . . ) Continue reading »