[avatar user=”Mosh” size=”50″ align=”left” /]The wonderfully-named Bleed hail from the Netherlands, and recently released their debut album Seven Billion Demons. Which is a lot of demons.
Formed by ex-members of many Dutch underground bands, they started out being pretty much a metalcore act. However, as they drew closer to laying down some tracks for recording, their own sound began to emerge. The music is very much drawn from classic thrash, while there are frequent breaks into a more hardcore sound while maintaining the metalcore vocals and lyrical content.
This produces a sound which is accessible to the older fans who like their thrash while also pulling in the younger metalcore crowd. Best of all is that the different styles within any one song seem to flow well into one another without appearing forced or disjointed.
Take the opening (title) track, for instance. Kicking off as a thrash song, it ends with a far more hardcore sound and yet within the track there are a couple of near traditional metal guitar breaks. “No Hope Without Suffering” is a personal highlight with a great mixture of thrash, death-style vocals, chugging rhythms and Pantera-esque spoken segments. Owing more to the hardcore roots is “Tear it Down” which couldn’t be much different in overall style.
I also love the intro to “Wolves Among Sheep” which is surprisingly and unexpectedly funky.
This is a great debut album with a wealth of variety, mixing a couple of styles which it turns out are natural companions. You can get the album for free or a nominal “donation” (be generous) from various sites. Check out the links below. If you’d prefer a nice CD, then you can get them from Amazon or CDbaby. Hell, treat yourself to a limited edition digipak for €10 and they’ll include a bonus track, too! Drop ’em a facebook message if you’re interested in that.
You can listen to the album via some of the links below, so I’m not going to preview any of the tracks here. Instead, wrap your ears round their rather excellent cover of Pantera’s “Fucking Hostile”!
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