Arch Enemy - Covered in Blood

Cover albums are usually the type of project that bands love making. It’s a nice, often nostalgic break from the mental toil of writing a batch of new songs, and a chance for a band to pay tribute to the artists that inspired them to pursue music in the first place. Whether through whatever discussion the band partakes in surrounding the album or just their animated performances of the songs they used to air guitar to in their youth, you can tell how excited band members get for the chance to do albums like these. The writing is all done for them, and it’s confirmed, in their minds at least, to be gold-status material. All there is to do is just go out there and perform it. The only thinking really involved is over the degree of creative liberty a band decides to take with any song, and there is merit in both the true-to-the-original approach as well as wild reinterpretation, when done conscientiously.

Arch Enemy have covered quite a few songs throughout their career (some of which show up on this album) and consistently taken rather flat approaches to those songs. Following suit to all premonitions of its potency based on cover songs past, Covered in Blood, is a drab, if not infuriating, stab at the cover album. Arch Enemy spend 70 minutes running songs from Queensrÿche, Megadeth, Tears for Fears, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and others through a re-assembly line that strips away whatever diverse charm these songs all originally had, and replaces it with this dry, one-size-fits-all melodeath. The musical poncho Arch Enemy fit these songs with is just so hard to listen for such a long time, and the way they paste their style onto songs with not a lot of effort being done to make it a good fit is just so lazily formulaic and frustrating. The crossover thrash cuts by Skitslickers and the cover of the Moderat Likvidation are where the band sound at least a little lively and at least performing in a complimentary way. But when it comes to the more repetitive cuts like “Shout” or “Shadow on the Wall”, the band don’t really do much to liven the tracks up vocally or instrumentally, and they become very grating as they drag on without anything to spice up the band’s autopilot performances. Furthermore, Alissa White-Gluz’ un-dynamic growls are just as thoughtlessly spread over every track like peanut butter over a dog’s nose just like the instrumentals are, but when the band get to songs like “Aces High”, “Breaking the Law”, and “Walk in the Shadows”, whose majesties were originally achieved by soaring melodic vocal parts, the lack of effort to tailor their sound appropriately makes these moments particularly aggravating. They’re a talented group and they sure run through all these songs with technical ease, but this album just sounds like Arch Enemy repeatedly showing us “look, we can play this song”, like it’s the warm-up to band practice, which is just such a dull angle for a cover album. Usually these types of albums are passion projects that bands enjoy for the sake of paying straight-up tributes to influences of theirs or even just shaking up classic songs, but Arch Enemy sound like they didn’t put any effort into these songs or even wanted to. There really isn’t any one song on here that I would ever come back to for either it’s rivaling of or its novel interpretation of the original.

Covered in Blood is an incredibly bloated example of the least interesting kind of cover album out there, one that simply pushes various artists’ songs, no matter the type, through a processor to fit the covering band’s style. In this case, Arch Enemy plug a bunch of songs into the Arch Enemy melodeath formula and churn out a lot of unflattering takes on various songs and a lot of unflattering examples of the formulaic product of their sound, with a baffling lack of awareness of how poor their style choices are.

We made an AI listen to 10 hours of Arch Enemy and then make a cover album, this is what it gave us/10