Blood Runneth Over

This Polish band arose from the ashes of the black metal band Vallachia. Grimlord with born of the desire to do more traditional heavy metal music and has since released several demos and CD singles since 2000. The band now consists of Bartosz Zrebiec (guitar/vocals), Bartosz "Orson" Koprowski (bass) and drummer Lukasz "Lukass" Boratyn. Blood Runneth Over is the band's newest release and just a note to any bands in a similar situation of trying to get exposure by shopping around a self-released piece of work....How hard is it to include some info about the band when sending out CDs to review? A CD-R copy of this album came with a colour photocopy of the front cover of the album listing the song titles.....that's it. In this day and age of user friendly graphics software etc, it should be a very easy task for any band, let alone one that is looking for some exposure and input, to put together something that makes reviewing their piece of work a little easier. Any background info about this band had to be found by searching the net...not a good first impression on the part of this reviewer.

Grimlord seems to be trying to achieve more of a retro NWOBHM style with the very "dated" guitar sound and general feel of their music. I also hear elements of bands like MercyFul Fate, Venom, Demon and many other classic underground 80's metal bands. The guitar riffs are very Mercyful Fate like and some of the recklessness of early Iron Maiden can be heard with tracks like BWAKUC (Beast We Are Keeping Under Cover). More mid tempo Megadeth metal styles can be heard with Grey Eminence and Resting Place. Musically, the musicianship is fairly solid with decent riffs and good lead breaks but the annoying ring of the snare is a major production flaw and gets irritating after a while. Not quite St. Anger proportions, the snare is too loud in the mix and and has way too much echo. Vocalist/guitarist Bartosz Zrebiec has a rather gruff voice and comes off sounding a bit like Paul Di'anno with a touch of Chris Boltendahl (Grave Digger). His heavily accented voice and complete lack of any sense of melody really sinks this band really fast. Not only that, most of the songs cruise along with very little sense of cohesiveness or structure and then all of a sudden, they just end. A few tracks on this album are absolute train wrecks and are nothing but a sloppy mess. Weird vocal effects and other taped voices including some Terminator excerpts are yet more examples that this band really has no clue as to how to write the proper vocal lines/melodies/choruses to fit the style of their music. Some of the vocal lines and "attempts" at melodies are completely out of place.

I can sense that this band was going for a dark and retro heavy metal sound with this album. However, if you're looking for worldwide exposure in an ever competitive market, you had better come up with something better than what we have here. Seriously, any garage band out there could put something together like this. To their credit, GrimLord has attempted something original here and I applaud that. However, issues with the vocals and overall songwriting must be addressed if they are in fact serious about trying to take Grimlord to the next level......