World Under Blood – Tactical (2011)

Formed by CKY’s front-man/guitarist Deron Miller and super drummer Tim Yeung, today we have Wonder Under Blood and their debut full-length release “Tactical”. As you can tell, this seems like an odd combination but it actually works wonders and this debut release is a fine example of different sounding Melodic Death Metal. As we mentioned, World Under Blood does not sound like your typical Swedish Melodic DM or your commercial Melo-Death bands you have in North America these days. The band has their own different sound and nicely mixes brutality with brilliant melodic sections.

As you can tell from the opening track “A God Among the Waste”, the band is not f’ing around and delivers powerful riffing with very well crafted drumming. The clean/growl vocal approach sounds a bit odd at the beginning, but it quickly grows on you. The music reminds us of the band Godless Rising, but with a bit less brutality. The quality of the solos never decreases through this release and on tracks like “Into the Arms of Cruetly”, “Dead and Still in Pain” and “Purgatory Dormitory”, they nicely highlight sections of very well crafted songs.

For fans of more extreme music, songs like “Pyro-Compulsive” and “Under the Autumn Low” are like a bag of bricks to the face, but with a nice melodic edge that not many bands call pull-off. I guess the combination of musicians from different scenes allows this band to sound very diverse and never gets dull (ok, maybe the clean vocal ‘chorus’ like sections). On songs like “I Can’t Stand His Name”, the band nicely alternates from full-on fast drumming to nice melodic sections here and there.

Our favorite song of this album has to be “Revere’s Tears”, in this piece the music starts very mellow and completely different to anything else in the album until the 1 minute mark or so. After this change, the guitar riffing sounds a bit like Death and the song it self has a whole different pace since the drumming is not going 200 miles per hour. As a closing track, this song really gives a different view at what the band is able to do.

We are suckers for Melodic Death Metal, however, almost everything sound the same these days, except for World Under Blood. If you are a fan of brutality with a melodic edge, then run to the store and get this fine piece of Metal.

Release: July 26th, 2011

Country: USA