(Soulseller Records launched Blood Red Throne’s latest album in December of last year, and of course we knew the time would eventually arrive when our DGR would write it up (because he loves this band’s music) — and now he has.)
This is a review for a 2025 release
A hair under two years is pretty quick turnaround time in the world of heavy metal. That doesn’t translate much to a layman’s way of thinking of course, as the old adage still holds true that creativity does not exist in a vacuum nor could you every try to put any time scale on inspiration. Some groups are prolific, others move at a snail’s pace – it’s a case of what works for some, may not work for others.
That said, it’s hard not to get a little spooked when turnaround time feels too quick between albums. Any number of events could take place in the background to cause it: new contracts may require new albums in a year, sometimes material gets backburnered or banked for future releases, but the year over year turn has just as often resulted in releases coming out as straight-shooting and “expected” as an album could be. Quick releases are likely the home of more solid-sevens out there than anything else.
But what then do you do when a band whose very existence is consistency, as if they themselves are the universal continuity upon which the world is built? Anything lesser would result in galactic cataclysm and anything more would equal a galactic sublimation. What if a band just exists on that line of “good-to-great” or “inarguably-solid-as-a-rock”? What then does a quick-feeling turnaround time do to them?
Even though the year may have ended, we still have to touch base with a few releases and one we weren’t about to let escape from our sight was the mid-December unleashing of Blood Red Throne’s latest album Siltskin.
Photo Credit: Michal Dudulewicz
With Siltskin Blood Red Throne find themselves further cementing their legacy within the world of death metal as one of the most reliable acts out there. They are twelve albums deep into a career that has been running since the late ’90s with nary a long gap between albums. You rarely achieve that sort of thing without stumbling into a consistent groove over the course of your time on stage, and Blood Red Throne have been pretty good about sticking to a two-to-three year turnover on their albums. In fact, had there been a month longer in waiting, the initally spooky 2024 to 2025 gap of Nonagon to Siltskin would be a legitimate two-year gap.
That’s why for all the sort of bet-hedging and worry-warting about it, Siltskin remains a trademark Blood Red Throne album. It breathes, looks, and sounds just like them, and it also isn’t that shocking that it shares a lot of the same aspirations as Nonagon did before it. Blood Red Throne take you on a whirlwind tour of modernized groove-heavy death metal, music that befits describing them as Earth-moving equipment, for nine songs and forty-five-and-a-half-minutes. Three minutes longer than Nonagon but otherwise the same number of songs as its immediate predecessor and Fit To Kill two albums before that, leaving 2021’s Imperial Congregation the oddball at an indulgent ten songs.
The reliability of a band like Blood Red Throne is both comforting and dangerous. That Siltskin hews so closely to the group’s prior albums means that you’re almost guaranteed a comfort zone of death metal songs; if you’ve acknowledged that the group’s hefty groove works for you, then Blood Red Throne’s sort of unerring professionalism in unleashing song after song of gore-soaked romp is perfect. The prototypical shuffle-band par excellence in that way. You can absolutely absorb Blood Red Throne album-to-album but it’s also just as exciting to let the overwhelming bulldozer that is the band’s entire catalog just flatten you into the dirt.
Sometimes, it seems like the eras of the band shift based solely on the vocalist up front and just how blastbeat-heavy any specific song gets, but Blood Red Throne have never been one to just unleash overcomplicated guitar riffs wherein the only option is hammering the drums into the foundation of the recording studio. The dangerous part of this is that the “shuffle band” label can work both ways, the overall catalog being less distinct than one might want, and therefore often the group vacillate between a seven and an eight overall. The weapons-grade songs are enough to take someone’s head off otherwise, and usually a Blood Red Throne album will have three or so of those, enough that at a certain point each album becomes a tense waiting game to see which one launches a streetlight pole at you from across the room.
If you treat the opening two songs of Slilskin as the opening tutorial of the band – both “Scraping Out The Cartilage” and “Beneath The Means” are excellent “welcome to the show” style songs – then the pairing of “Husk In The Grain” and “Necrolysis” are the killer follow ups that have Siltskin coming into its own. Filled with martial riffs and a marching percussion section, the song’s musical dissections are soundtracked by riffs that roll back and forth to compact the ground below them.
The mid-point track “Anodyne Rust” being one of the shorter songs allows for Blood Red Throne to shake the listener up for a bit, just as you were settling into the comfort-zone of rumbling guitar parts. The pairing of “Vestigial Remnants” and “Vermicular Heritage” – yes, the “V” and following word pattern is fun for stastistics purposes – are Blood Red Throne well in their aforementioned comfort zone. It is death metal at its most gigantic sounding, and at times can make you miss the modernized anti-tank firing of a band like Volturyon and the similarly groove-heavy approach that they were traveling on. Siltskin is an album that moves by weight alone at times and much like the 1980s remake of The Blob, it isn’t afraid to off just about anyone who gets any screen time. No one is safe and neither is any death metal trope that is within Blood Red Throne’s grasp.
At that point, Siltskin is undeniable. Much like Nonagon before it, there are few albums as dedicated to proving that they are “none more death metal” than those two. Slitskin has just as many killer rhythm riffs as it does ear-rending vocal passages and bass-drums being kicked down multiple flights of stairs, all you could possibly want. It is close to forty-five minutes of massive guitar and gigantic songwriting. No matter what lineup changes may come their way, Blood Red Throne are frighteningly skilled at finding their way back to the core death metal mode where they’ve always lived. Siltskin is mechanically efficient at grinding some listeners into dust and snapping the necks of others at the same time.
It can get a little too comfortable in its own shoes at times with dynamics existing at a steady ground-churning, but this is one of those albums that perfectly befits the death metal mood. If you don’t need the intellectual challenge of something more avante-garde and could do with something purely made for the caveman brain, Siltskin – and really, Blood Red Throne as a whole – will answer that call perfectly well.
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