Bleeding Utopia - Darkest Potency

Published April 29 2014

*=Staff's pick	Blackest Of Bloods* Your Kingdom Will Fall This Is Where We Die I Will Return All Life Withers Your Lifeless Sire* Bring Me Your Dead Until Death Collects Them All Nighttime Divine

Genre	Melodic Death/Thrash Metal	David Ahlén	Vocals
Tracks	9	Andreas Morén	Guitar
Running time	41 Min.	Joakim Bergros	Guitar
Label	Rambo Music/Sony Music	David Ahlén	Bass
Release	30 April 2014	Kevin Talley	Drums
Country	Sweden	-	Keyboard
Producer	Jocke Skog/Bleeding Utopia
Similar artists	---

When considering the given type of music above, it's hardly surprising that this album is rather brutal all throughout. The scanty variation of Bleeding Utopia's second effort alternates between an aggressive variable with a generally furious orientation and short sections of heavy parts in some form of death metal mid-tempo. It's basically grinding from start to finish without really letting go of the aggression and the raging attitude. Naturally all songs aren't savage beasts, whose intention is to rip your skin off, but still the room for breathers is highly limited.

Similar to several other bands of this vein, the melodic epithet to death and thrash is mainly derived from the nature of the solo guitar, which on various occasions creates its own sort of melodies beside the forceful and grinding ongoing parts. This somewhat balanced feature enables the roughness to be supplemented by certain harmonies which make you pay a little extra attention to what's presented. This is of course no infrequent trick within this type of music and there are lots of bands who have benefited from this matter earlier.

I enjoy a solid portion of what I get and specifically I like the overall sound picture and the record's powerful type of production. This release won't ever become a massive success in terms of sales figures and it will probably never become an important factor in the business, but still I think that it stands up well against other stuff within this genre, even though this record is by all means nothing that confirms new elements to the scene. Although this music may be seen as a little repetitive, I never become particularly saturated during these forty-one minutes of pulverizing material, which sometimes negatively proves to be an obstacle to this kind of metal.

The vocal performance is unsurprisingly not very varied, as it finds itself pretty much within an extremely small range in general. David Ahlén however receives my stamp of approval, primarily because his enraged voice and the thunderous music fit well together and not for the actual quality he represents. On the other hand, it's rarely high skilled vocals I'm looking for while I digest these explosive experiences and I see myself more a fan to the actual force that this type of music provides and by that I hand out 6 chalices to a rather all right release.

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
6	4	8	6	6

Summary
6 chalices of 10 - Tobbe