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In This Moment - Blood
11-Aug-2012 Label: Century Media/EMIProduced by Kevin Churko
Playing Time: 48.21
Rating: 95%
Reviewed by Christine Caruana
When I spoke to Maria Brink last year about A Star-Crossed Wasteland, she told me that In This Moment are “kind of all over the place, and I think we kind of collaborated a lot of aspects of our band in that album.” Their sound has always been experimental, and A Star-Crossed Wasteland saw them taking that aspect further with new vocal styles and instrumentation. Going back to that album after listening to Blood, it doesn’t seem as different to their first two records as I initially thought on its release.
Blood has seen In This Moment take experimentation and run, no, sprint with it. The first single “Blood” is the perfect track to symbolise the record.A safer track could have been chosen to introduce fans to this new side of their music, but this feels like they are making the statement that they're changing, like it or not.
The electronic beats on “Blood” – and the whole record – are new to the band and it complements their style of metal perfectly. The guitar solo has a classic metal sound, and over the top of fragmented drums and electronic sounds, it creates a soundscape like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
In the past, there was something sweet about the music they made, especially in the ballad tracks involving Brink and a piano. A few tracks come close to being ballads here ("Scarlet" and "Blood Legion"), due to their stripped down sound, but during the last third of each they reach the crescendo of metal intensity. Apart from "11:11", which would be the token ballad track, done a'cappela, Blood is the complete opposite. The lyrics, coupled with the electronic sounds and the dirty guitars, create sleazy, sexy, dirty rock and roll.
In This Moment haven’t held anything back here. Perhaps that comes from the recent line-up changes Blood is as heavy as any other ITM record, but it is also so much more. Tracks like “Whore” have an almost pop/hip-hop vocal melody on top of their signature metal sound, and “Beast Within” has a pop/dance feel as Brink demands to “see you move your bodies.” They may be experimenting with everything from electronics to pop, but Blood has the intensity to rock - and it rocks hard.
Every track on this record has something to be said about it. It really is an album full of highlights. Blood is both somehow the same ITM we’ve heard before, but also completely different. The change is not that of a band selling out or abandoning their past. It’s growth, and the different sounds heard here simply just work. It’s rock and roll at its most dirty and sexy.
1. Rise With Me
2. Blood
3. Adrenalize
4. Whore
5. You're Gonna Listem
6. Is is Written
7. Burn
8. Scarlet
9. Aries
10. From the Ashes
11. Beast Within
12. Comanche
13. The Blood Legion
14. 11:11
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