Album Review: Bleeding Through - 'Love Will Kill All'

Ok, I’ll be honest here: I wanted to absolutely pan this album. I truly did. And I say that as a long, long time fan of Bleeding Through. When I first heard rumours they were about to release new material I thought “Fucking why? It’s 2018 and they ‘broke up’ four years ago. Who on earth needs this?”. But, unfortunately, I just cannot pan their comeback record. And fortunately for any Bleeding Through fan out there, you probably can't either. Maybe.

Ever since the release of their last album, 2012's 'The Great Fire' I maintained that this band has never had a bad release, and this once again rings true with 'Love Will Kill All'. But by no measure is it a totally great release. For at the heart of it, it is still very much a Bleeding Through album - jarring sonic transitions and all - just soaked in a little more Orange County rock (read: accessible).

Is this an evolution, or just a band trying to stay relevant in today’s current metalcore climate, who can say? The clean singing is still cheesy but somehow still manages to sit well within the context of the songs, mostly. Well, with the exceptions being the album’s opener 'Darkness, A Feeling I Know', which is one-minute and twenty-one seconds of playing “when should I press the skip button?”, and the “anthemic" 'No Friends'; quite possibly the most beige metalcore song I’ve heard in a good long while, whose only saving grace is vocalist Brandon Schieppati’s caustic vocal and lyrical bitterness.

With all that being said, there is much, much more good than bad on offer.

Musically, this album pulls from every single era of Bleeding Through’s discography (yes, even the 'Portrait' era). Nothing here feels out of place at all, even with their addition of the more, shall we say “rock driven” segments. It just fits and it sounds exactly how you’d expect Bleeding Through to make it work. Though it does, sadly, lack the “smash an entire car with a bag of hammers” breakdowns of previous better albums. All up, it still hits instrumentally hard when it needs to... just not as hard as they once used to.

Lyrically, there is no new thematic ground to be broken here on 'Love Will Kill All'. Brandon is still spitting venomous words about love lost, seeking revenge and rising above it all. It’s a well-worn path, yes, but one that the guy treads with a style of his own. Coming up with new ways to write about the same subjects for the better part of two decades must be fucking hard, so absolutely kudos to him for that.

‘Love Will Kill All’ is distinctly and unmistakably a Bleeding Through record. It’s not the band at their finest hour, but it’s maybe them at their most refined.

1. Darkness, A Feeling I Know

2. Fade Into The Ash

3. End Us

4. Cold World

5. Dead Eyes

6. Buried

7. No Friends

8. Set Me Free

9. No One From Nowhere

10. Remains

11. Slave

12. Life

‘Love Will Kill All’ is out now via SharpTone Records.