Bloodbath - The Arrow of Satan Is Drawn

Bloodbath are perhaps representative of, or at least very near, the pinnacle of success for a supergroup like theirs. Formed by members of Opeth and Katatonia to have an outlet to indulge their old-school death metal urges, Bloodbath has become a much more seriously and carefully taken project since its inception, and has become one of death metal’s most revered names. Before, in the group’s early years, the members, while bringing an unfairly stacked level of talent to the table, were not shooting for much beyond an enjoyable side project for themselves. The bar wasn’t set too high despite the incredible quality on the roster, and naturally, the band obliterated their own expectations and became a more desirable force to be reckoned with in the genre. Two decades in, though, and expectations have been raised. Bloodbath isn’t just the fun little side gig it started out as anymore. This isn’t just a little extra material from the likes of Nick Holmes, Jonas Renske, Peter Tägtgren, and fucking Mikael Åkerfeldt, for the metal world to look at like as a nice little bonus. Not anymore. Bloodbath is seen, rightfully so, as an elite contributor to the death metal game. There’s a certain expectation surrounding each release now that transcends the band’s inadvertent beginnings. It’s not just a couple of great players getting together for a jam sesh now; it’s the banner under which some of the genre’s biggest names have gathered to showcase their continued excellence. And I have loved that aspect of Bloodbath. It feels like they’re like death metal’s Olympic team and all these great performers are coming out to make their genre proud. And that anticipation has led to the arguable classic status of Nightmares Made Flesh and the wealth of winning material on each subsequent album.

If anything has been lost along this amateur-gone-pro story (even through they were hardly ever amateurs), it seems like it’s the carefree spirit that characterized the band’s early releases. They’re seasoned professionals now and they have built the stadium they have to keep filling now. Granted that tangible passion to tribute the style of old in their earlier releases was due in part to the release of all that pent up inspiration through competent means, but they don’t seem to have just that raw urge to indulge in the sounds of old now. Naturally, it’s their job, and they’ve been doing it for two decades now.

Nevertheless, Bloodbath don’t sound stale or bored, and each album release is still an exciting prospect for them to provide the modern landscape with an offering of the classic stuff.

So coming off of the band’s first release with Nick Holmes providing the growls in 2014, Grand Morbid Funeral, which doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, Bloodbath seem to have approached this album very thoughtfully with the successes and drawbacks of that previous album being taken into consideration. And even if this album is still a pretty expected form of Bloodbath, it shows.

The band seem more in-tune with Nick Holmes now, enough so that they have mustered to confidence to branch out on this album a bit, not mostly to new territory, but in all sorts of directions in the way they approach their now-patented version of old-school death metal. But the band do seem to be working in more black metal influences on this record than before, especially in the guitar-work

The opening track, “Fleischmann”, sets this precedent early with furious blast-beat drumming and dissonant guitar chords opening the track before its down-tuned slowdown, leading into the carnivorous death metal riffage of the fiercely riffed lead single, “Bloodicide”. The band do well on the many straightforward death metal cuts on here like the slowly but incineratingly burning “Levitator” and the contrasting gallop of “Deader” to reaffirm their dominance on the genre. The one stale example of this approach is the “Cancer of the Soul” redux of “March of the Crucifiers”. The song is reliant on the savor of the simple guitar riff to carry the recycled vocal rhythm, which this album’s production does not facilitate well.

I suppose now is as good of a time as any to squash one main issue I have with this album, the very cloudy, unflattering mixing. The guitars’ fantastic, distinct tone from the previous album is here as well, but the strings are all so clumsily blended together they obscure each other in the more fully-involved segments of the album that when they all play together at least one part is getting buried in the mix. The production seems to be an adjustment to the more heavily black metal direction the band take on a lot of the tracks on the album, trying to get that thick haze of blackened distortion for the parts that benefit from it. And it works alright in those moments, but it’s not the most conducive mix for the band’s more death-metal-driven parts, which are still the majority.

The band do mostly overcome this awkward production choice by playing to the style it caters, and making the album less about its mixing and more about its content. The indulgent palm-muted grooves and black metal tremolo picking on the ever-compounding progression on “Only the Dead Survive” make for a prime example of Bloodbath’s compositional ambition being put to good use over a longer piece that bucks the previous songs’ structural trend with plenty of fire in its breath and the kinds of ideas that might have easily tempted any of the band members to reserve them for their main projects. This is definitely the shining moment on this record.

The band go off on a few slightly unusual paths, but ultimately bring the same musical weaponry and ferocity with them wherever they go, like the somewhat thrash-inspired riffing of “Wayward Samaritan” or the . The very black-metal-influenced “Morbid Antichrist” shows the band’s creativity with the dynamics of the slow groove they utilize on the verses and the apocalyptic tone they cultivate so naturally to fit the subject matter of the song, and the subsequent down-tuned groove of “Warhead Ritual” shows the band overcoming the poor mixing on the album with very centralized riffing that certainly brings the invigorating energy it’s supposed to.

The band’s oddest foray comes at the very end of the album in the form of the very Floridian, slasher-film-inspired “Chainsaw Lullaby”, which almost sounds like it even takes some cues from Rob Zombie with its pre-chorus’ choppy vocal delivery.

Bloodbath are not really providing the boisterous assertion of their presence and showy display of their knowledge of how death metal is done that they have on albums past. But to peg them as uninspired or lethargic on this album would be quite exaggerated. The band clearly wanted to make this a rounded album and made a lot of hard, but well-processed choices about where and how they showcase their greatest strengths. And for the most part, I think they made the right choices, even if they didn’t quite adjust properly for all of them at the soundboard. This album is not blowing me out of the water, but it would be unjust to call it simply serviceable; it does well to show Bloodbath’s strengths from many angles, and those strengths are certainly visible, even if the view is a little fuzzy. It’s the kind of album that makes me hope for either one of two things though for the future of this line-up of Bloodbath: either a greater commitment to the black metal elements they clearly found themselves so infatuated with here or a recalibration to the standard, old-school death metal that they have made their modus operandi, because the band only cover so much over the course of an album of this size that I think they’ll have to pick what they most want to represent, and do so to the fullest without much distraction.