Blood Tsunami at Myspace

Blood Tsunami’s sophomore effort is caught between two extremes. On one hand, the songwriting  is perfectly fine; they know how to write good riffs and the musicianship is excellent. The only truly poorly-written song in my opinion was the 13-minute instrumental Eceladus Rising, which has some good parts but just felt aimless overall. Unfortunately, the guitars just aren’t heavy enough for this material to work fully; for most of the album, there’s a distinct lack of the oomph that thrash metal needs to succeed. Instead of playing their songs in a brutally heavy style, the guitarists just glide along like a poorly animated CGI monster that’s far too agile for its size; there’s little sense of weight to these songs, however well constructed they are.

Compounding the problem is that the vocalist sings in a style that suits death metal more than Blood Tsunami’s brand of melo-thrash (and the backing vocals are even harsher). The contrast between the relatively light, melodic riffs and the growling vocals hurts the material greatly. That said, Grand Feast of Vultures is far from being a horrible album; it’s tightly played and never bogs down in repetition. It’s just that its limitations are highly disappointing and could be easily remedied.

Church of Misery at Myspace

Japan’s Church of Misery have offered up another solid album of groovy stoner doom metal  with Houses of the Unholy. The first thing that I should mention is that while this is a fine album, it’s not innovative by any stretch of the imagination, with the songwriting based firmly in the 1970′s. However, the Church do a great job within those confines. The band’s lyrics are all about serial killers, much like the band Macabre, but the similarities end there, as there’s little of Macabre’s grim humor in these lyrics. I have to commend vocalist Yoshiaki Negishi; he chooses to downplay his Japanese accent (not that I have anything against them), and does it extremely well; I never once would have suspected this band was Japanese if I listened to this release blind. His delivery is raspy without straying far from the style of 70′s metal vocalists.

The songs are frequently lengthy (five of the album’s eight cuts are more than seven and a half minutes long), so the grooves have plenty of room to breathe. The musicianship is fine but really takes a back seat to the hypnotic chord sequences; doom metal is more about the songwriting and riffs than technical skills. Fans of 70′s metal and hard rock would do well to check this out.