The project Bloodbath was born as a tribute to old-school Swedish death metal, around an all-star line-up whose hard core remains the duo Jonas Renks and Anders Nyströmmembers of Catatonia. The line-up has evolved in the meantime, the atmospheres have been declined album following album (the latest, The Arrow Of Satan Is Drawnwas indeed eyeing the side of black metal), and today the band’s sixth effort reads like an ode to death metal, transporting us from Sweden to Florida between the late 80s and early 90s, in musical landscapes between Morbid Angel, Deicide et Obituary.
The clips or the yellowish hues of the cover art show it well: the approach is as much visual and cinematic as it is musical, the imagery of horror films being moreover very often associated with the old school death metal dusted off here . Death, decomposing flesh, zombies, mutilation are all clichés declined here by the band with generosity even delight. We feel a real jubilation of the musicians to detail barbarism or putrefaction and to draw deadly atmospheres. This visual creation is felt both in the musical atmospheres set up but also in the hard-hitting and colorful lyrics magnified by the strong articulation and the intensity of the cavernous timbre of Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost), excellent in his role as the (British) leader of the (Swedish) supergroup. The vocal singularity of the latter now seems completely affirmed, more in any case than when he arrived in 2014 for Grand Morbid Funeral in the footsteps of his predecessor Mikael Åkerfeldt.
