Band: Bloodiest
Title: Descent
Label: Relapse Records
Distribution: Rough Trade Benelux.
Release date: March 29th 2011
Review: CD

Bloodiest are very known within the Chicago-scene, consisting of seven (!) (former and current) members from notorious acts like Yakuza, Follows, Atombombpocketknife or 90 Day Men).
The Relapse-epic Descent (38:49, six songs) opens with Fallen. This song starts with a haunting riff, after a second or forty it starts to doom in a bleak dimension (the same riffs, with a slowly pounding drum pattern and something like a horror-tuned piano?), and when the mesmerizing, haunting clean vocals join, the droning atmosphere gets dense and thick like a toxic fog. A six-minute Sludge-killer with a bad mother*ckin’ attitude… Coh is a shorter, somewhat shamanistic track, with acoustic support, and at the same time a nice introduction to Pastures, a hypnotic Doom / Sludge / Post-Rock / Ambient epic that sounds both oppressing and resurrecting. Dead Inside too combines the discordant piano additions, the monotonous and repetitive Drone / Sludge riffs and rhythm section (Sunn O))) meets Horseback) and the shamanistic vocals, but for the first time, singer Bruce Lamont (e.g. Yakuza, Ibex, Circle Of Animals) experiments with his vocals, using rawer and whispering ranges. The song gets enormously intense after a while, then again noisy (nineties’ Chicago-influence) yet ritual and trippy. Slave Rule originally is an epic (semi) acoustic song with a folksy undertone, transforming after about five minutes into a psychedelic and monumental sludgy Doom hymn, before ending in some Godflesh goes Drone-madness. Obituary, finally, is another impressive moker, heavy and melodic, conjuring and resolute.
For brave ones that will enjoy a very unusual yet mostly interesting marriage of Doom Metal, Drone, Post-Rock, Sludge, ritualistic chants and haunting atmospheres.

86/100

Ivan Tibos.