Focus Reviews

Blinded By Faith - Weapons Of Mass Distraction
Style: Death Metal/Melodic
Running Time: 44 Minutes and 15 Seconds
Label: http://www.galyrecords.com


Maybe opening your album with the sounds of planes crashing into the World Trade Centers really seemed like a good idea to set the mood for a darker sounding melodic death metal album. In all aspects though it just feels wrong to have to bring that up to achieve your theme. To be quite truthful the album could have started without that and Blinded By Faith still would have had a release that was quite decent.

For melodic death metal it's a little hard to stand out in a crowd. Every thing is a little redundant and boring these days, and very few bands release solid efforts that move anyone to feeling something new of the genre. Blinded By Faith have released 'Weapons Of Mass Distraction' to an over populated scene rampant with stagnation and barely any technical movement beyond whats been achieved already. By no means are they pushing the boundaries of melo-death, but at least they're not completely boring in their attempts.

Guitars that seem to, out of nowhere, kick into overdrive and speed through some intricate passages of short technicality. This technicality plays well in the back of the music but when brought forth through solos its evident that the solo work is pretty substandard, sounding like very bad fretboard wankery that seemingly leads nowhere. Vocal work that ranges out of the norm at times, and drum work that sets a very nice canvas for everything to lay on. Theres nothing much here that you wouldn't be familiar with already, and to be perfectly honest its not a bad feeling of familiarity. Though on occasion the vocals bothered me, ranging in and out of screaming/shouting/clean sung and deeper not quite guttural sounding moments. The very same vocals felt refreshing at times though when they were dropped completely and set aside for some spoken word, or female vocal work.

In 44 minutes Blinded By Faith have ran headlong through eight real tracks and two intro/outros. While the intro/outro tracks do absolutely nothing for me it's obviously felt elsewhere these were necessary tracks that needed to be on this release. All in all though for as familiar as 'Weapons Of Mass Distractions' is I can't say that I'm thoroughly disappointed or really awe-struck with this release. Albeit no technical achievement whatsoever from what we've really come to expect, still a very solid release.


Score: 6.5/10