Artist: Blood Offer
Country: Italy
Label: Iron Fortress Records
Formats: Cassette Tape / CD
Year: 2025
After a decent but kind of messy start in the form of their ‘Into Evil Rites’ demo tape (or EP), this company of youngsters from the northern part of Italy felt enough encouragement around them to go for a full-length record. The American Iron Fortress Records apparently shared that idea as they signed up for releasing it on both cassette tape and CD formats. But after listening to ‘All That Dies… Is Forsaken’, I’m not so sure whether this album might be coming a little too early in their fledgling career.
The Death Metal with a slight thrashy edge to it might harken back to the heydays of the genre from the early 90’s, it never gets really close in either quality or authenticity. Of course, they are forgiven for all that; not only have these young lads not been around for very long, but comparing a new band to the classics is perhaps not entirely fair (even though many of those bands were around the same age at the time).
The previously released EP was rather messy in nature, but had somewhat of a charm to it, especially considering it was their first effort on releasing something. From a full-length album we might expect a bit more, but, honestly, this is virtually on the same level. It is still clunky at best. Listen to the first minute or so from ‘Realm Of Insanity’. What the hell is going on there? Some extremely untight playing with a dominant role for the shockingly ramshackle drumming. It is clear that the band takes their main influences from the early American Death Metal scene, with some dynamic song writing and heavy chugging riffs and some solid dry grunts, it is just that basically every song lacks a certain coherence. Instead they sound more like some glued together ideas, lacking any fluent bridges or something else that keeps all this together.
While it is by no means a bad thing if you are a limited musician, in fact, many of the world’s best music came from people with more creativity than musical talent, but at least you should stay within your abilities. The few attempts on melodicism or even technical intricacies are downright painful and embarrassing. Which is a shame, as there certainly are a few decent ideas here and there.
And, to round things of in similar manner, the production is really not helping either. Tommaso “Desecrator” Volpe is commonly regarded as a capable guy in the north Italian scene, but he either must have had a few bad days or had a strict deadline to work with, as this sounds thin and it actually highlights all the shortcoming of these young fellas.
At the risk of sounding overly negative or unfair, to me it is abundantly clear that Blood Offer might have done themselves a favour by staying in the rehearsal room for a bit longer. For now, unfortunately, ‘All That Dies… Is Forsaken’ is nothing but a skippable record.
