Bleeding Utopia
Demons to Some, Gods to Others

Swedish band Bleeding Utopia are releasing their debut album, one that has a very nice looking album cover that is quite thought provoking in its form. So at first glance there are many things speaking favourably about this album, although I have learnt from past experience that judging a record from its cover is about as wise as eating a plate of vomit as the covers might be completely wrong in terms of displaying the sound of an album, sometimes it is also right but sometimes wrong, or right, you never really know which beforehand. But now let us not dwell on how wrong (or right) album covers might be but instead look at this album. Well, it is an album, it has tracks, some guys play instruments, one does vocals and all in all that adds up to a full length album, something like that.

Looking at the music we end up with blackened thrash metal if we are to believe what some say, others say that they are thrash metal with elements of black or death metal. Both these descriptions can be said to be correct (as they are more or less the same) as well because it is something of a more extreme form of thrash metal, I had blackened thrash metal just a few days back in the album by Armageddon which is quite different from this one but labeled the same which makes me think that this blackened thrash thing might be bigger than I thought. Quite aggressive it is and the vocals are mostly growly besides about one guest appearance of clean vocals which breaks of from the monotony of the unvaried vocals that adorns the rest of the album. I wouldn’t accuse these guys of varying their music too much through the ten tracks and near 48 minutes that this album goes on for.

So, is it good then? Well, it depends on you musical preference, if you like aggressive and unvaried extreme metal I guess this is your cup of tea. I don’t like tea or unvaried extreme metal so for me this album is about as great as the Volvo design department, well not really that bad, nothing can be that bad but it is a bit Swedish, devoid of imagination, inoffensive and dreary. This album does not really impress me at all and it feels a bit more like work than anything else to listen to this album, I found it being quite boring if I am honest which I think our readers expects me to be.

I noticed some good reviews of this album so they might not be completely off the mark of what is good music but to me they are not interesting at all. So, you may think I am a bit harsh on this band and maybe correctly so but this debut doesn’t really show anything that I find interesting for the future but then again, tastes vary and there might be something in there that you see and I don’t. For what I can see this album is a decently produced blackened thrash metal album that doesn’t really have the songs to close the deal. I don’t really think they nailed their debut.