CD Review: In This Moment - Blood
Century Media Records
All Access Review: C
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| In This Moment - Blood 2012 |
Maria Brink is not just another pretty face. For what it’s
worth, the In This Moment singer was recently named as one of Revolver magazine’s “25 Hottest Chicks
in Hard Rock.” Looks aside, Brink also possesses a powerful, commanding voice
that can turn incandescently soft and alluring in the blink of an eye. Her mood
can shift just as quickly when this beauty decides to turn into a beast.
Full of dark, carnal desire and tortured vivisections of stormy,
confused gender relations, Blood, In
This Moment’s potent but glossy and way over-produced fourth album of edgy,
pop-infused heavy metal, is damaged goods. Tense, angry and desperate, the
bombastic title track builds on a stiff, repeating riff, while an agitated
Brink yells at a kind, respectful lover, “I hate you for always saving me from
myself / I hate you for always choosing me and not someone else” and professes
her adoration for a cad, setting feminism back thousands of years. It makes for
riveting metal theater, as Brink rages on, and yet the tone, as warm as Formica
composites, is so shrill and sharp – as it is throughout Blood – that it seems capable of slitting wrists wide open.
Though clearly a platform for promoting the burgeoning star
power of Brink – only on the rarest of occasions does the instrumentation step
out from behind the shadows – Blood
sabotages her emotionally raw and unrepentantly lustful Oscar-worthy
performance at almost every turn. Unremarkable riffs, a ridiculous piling on of
arctic studio effects, unforgivable production butchery that mutilates the
chorus of “Blood” – all of it robs the album of its soul.
As slinky and seductive as a pole dancer at first, the
positively pornographic “Adrenalize” oozes sensuality – that is until a furious
and punishing rhythmic humping of guitars, bass and drums mindlessly gang-bangs
the whole thing into an unsatisfying oblivion. Too often, as with “Whore” and
“Beast Within,” In This Moment simply recycles riffs into perpetuity and then slowly
aggravates the tension until pulling the trigger on anticlimactic releases, and
by the time “The Blood Legion” arrives, traversing all the glacial passages of
icy electronica and frigid manipulations of Brink’s vocals – also encountered
in the absolutely pointless interlude “Aries” – that populate the landscape of Blood becomes tiresome.
Not all of Blood
needs a transfusion of originality and vitality. Even if the version of Nine
Inch Nails’ “Closer” seems slathered with pop lipstick, the cinematic flourish
of “Burn” finds In This Moment breaking symphonic metal levees and letting a
gorgeous flood of heavy guitars and strings wash over awestruck audiences,
while the transcendent radiance of “From the Ashes” is beautifully blinding and
the in-your-face aggression of “Comanche” wants to start a fight. A heavy metal
priestess in every sense, Brink’s fashion sense is glitzy, stylish and
anarchic, and she bears some cosmetic resemblance to Lady Gaga. Unfortunately,
the music of Blood seems, at times,
just as manufactured as Gaga’s.
- Peter Lindblad
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