You might not be familiar with noisy Swedish four-piece Blessings, but their raucous new album Blodsträngen (aka The Bloodline) should really be circled and underlined on the new release calendar of any self-respecting metalhead. For a lot of folks, when they talk about Swedish metal they’re thinking specifically about death metal. Blessings‘ home city of Gothenburg was certainly an instrumental part of the Swedish death metal scene, but to try and pigeonhole this band into that singular genre would be doing them a disservice.
They’ve come a long way from the rough, gritty, we-recorded-this-in-a-garage-in-one-take feel of 2012’s debut album Bittervatten, the evolution of the band’s style and sound plain to hear in the opening few seconds of second album Biskopskniven which was a far more polished and ambitious affair that really started to show what the band was capable of. So what about their third album? How has the band evolved and changed in those intervening four years? One simple way to chart the band’s musical progression is through a track called ‘String(s) of Red’. There’s one track with this title on all three albums, a story told in three parts, and there’s no mistaking how much the band’s sound has matured and evolved from their debut album’s scrappy beginnings to the gorgeous, powerful, head-banging anthem we find on Blodsträngen.
“there's no mistaking how much the band's sound has matured and evolved from their debut”
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Opening track, ‘Raised on Graves’, is more reminiscent of a Tool song than anything death or even doom metal, but it doesn’t stop there. Blessings are out to show off their writing chops and expand their musical repertoire. There are moments of beautiful, snarling orchestral synths that sound like they should be piped through the helmets of the Adeptus Astartes as they’re stomping filthy xeno ass, while at the same time the band isn’t shy about sneaking in a old-school cowbell here and there, the other instruments supported by a bass tone that goes from “meaty” to “filthy” and back again.
This is a serious album. A sludgy album. An occasionally playful album. It even dips into post rock with closing track Through Veils of Glass and Silica. Blodsträngen is album with a real streak of anger and despair running through it, but it’s not all doom and gloom. No Good Things is a surprisingly complex juxtaposition of upbeat lyrics, chunky bass and light, playful strings while track ‘Allt Vi Kan Ge Är Upp’ (All We Can Give is Up) is a layered affair with subtle details going on in the background, a track that really benefits from being listened to on a good pair of headphones rather than through speakers.
Blodsträngen is Blessings at their best. A band that has, over the last thirteen years, refined and polished their sound to give us an album that’s both easy to listen to, but that benefits from repeated listens, while at the same time the leaving the interpretation of each track up to the listener, to take away your own personal message from the music. But perhaps, as the band’s label themselves says, all that really matters is us all playing disgustingly loud music together in a room.
Blodsträngen is released Friday 1st of August on Pelagic Records