The Orange County crew have delivered their most satisfyingly ferocious set to date.
In hindsight, perhaps Gallows went too far in incorporating full orchestral passages in their second album, 2009’s Grey Britain. It’s one thing to have ambition, quite another to compromise the potency that made your name in the first place because you’ve the budget to employ a string section for an afternoon. So when Bleeding Through’s sixth studio LP opens with an instrumental, A Resurrection, the alarm bells begin to chime.
But the Orange County metal-goes-hardcore hybrids aren’t ones to taint their tonic without good reason, and the intro is merely a smokescreen for a blindsiding strike in the shape of Anti-Hero. When the first line of an album is “I want to suffer, I need to feel the pain and discontent”, the listener can rest fairly assured that what’s about to play out isn’t going to prove uncomfortably intellectualised. Anti-Hero is a furiously aggressive opening gambit proper, Slayer-challenging riffs building a head of corrosive steam that carries the sextet through a record that commentators elsewhere have already branded their best yet. This one certainly can’t argue any case against the claim.
Read the rest of this review on BBC CD reviews (Dutch)
Source: BBC Music