Overall Score: 7/10 Songs : 7/10 replay value: 6/10 Production: 8/10 Pros: When it hits the right notes, its some of the bands best material. The albums closing moments Cons: Far too scattershot and unfocused. Pacing issues
It’s hard to believe that Blood Command only dropped their last album Praise Armageddonism roughly 14 months ago, and we already have a follow up. World Domination is their 5th album and 2nd with Nikki Brumen.
You should probably know by now to expect the unexpected when it comes to Blood Command. But even still it’s always hard to go into a new album with any kind of expectations, good or bad. Well to put it bluntly, this album is a caffeine bomb to the senses. 20 tracks, about 50 different styles and an average track length of a minute and a half ish. Buckle up, its about to get weird af in here.
World Domination is a head spinning and head scratching collection of music. This album somehow manages to do so much and so little at the same time. There are some genuinely great moments on here, whether it’s the Morricone meets Beastie Boys opening of The Band with the Three Stripes, or the straight up punky bangers like Heaven’s Hate & A Plague On Both Your Houses, which the band has built their name on. It’s when the album starts applying the spaghetti against the wall method it runs into problems.
We get Welcome To The Next Level Above Human, which is less than a minute long and sounds like load screen music for the videogame Wipeout. Burn Again throws in a random Grime track into the mix. Decades sounds like that kind of early 90s pop ballad that has everyone in the video dressed in white against a snow covered backdrop. Reap What You Sow & Blue North completely 180 again and are two of the album punchiest and most aggressive tracks.
Look, we all know Blood Command have always been a band that has blended genres and blurred musical lines. But when your album is 20 tracks long and a good majority of those songs are throwaway interludes or tracks under a minute, you have to ask what the hell is the point. There are moments where this album absolutely nails it and it features some of the best material they have ever written. Not all of the more random tracks feel like a failure. Some of them are great, the aforementioned Reap What You Sow could have benefitted from being a longer track. If some of the more pointless tracks had been removed from the album entirely and the other more interested ones, extended and given room to breathe, this would be a much stronger release.
As it stands World Domination feels like a step down in quality from Praise Armageddonism, an album that still is a career high point for them.
With that said the albums closing triumvirate of World Domination, Losing Faith & Tetragram are 3 of the most delicate, mature and emotionally rich songs Blood Command have ever written, it’s a shame then that so much of the proceeding album is so scattershot and uneven, leaving listeners with a bad case of mental whiplash from trying to keep up with it.
World Domination is out on September 29th via Hassle Records
