Album Review: ThunderBlood – The Final Beginning

By BRIAN GIFFIN

I’M still not sure what’s going on with this one.

ThunderBlood is a band from Perth who talk about humour and uniqueness in their bio, both of which are good traits to play up when you’re as weird and as hard to take seriously as this band is. Honestly, if the name ThunderBlood wasn’t silly enough, the album title makes no sense whatsoever. The Final Beginning. What even is that?

The first track isn’t even a song, just a 53 second peal of thunder that doesn’t even segue into Mt Carnage, a song I could barely listen to with its strange vocalisations and baffling arrangement. Gone Are the Days is almost as bad, with the singer (the promo offers no personnel details, and I simply couldn’t be bothered trying to look them up) doing some odd lower register thing like the guy I heard trying to sing Danzig at karaoke in the Power House in LA one night.

Not only are ThunderBlood’s arrangements clumsy, but their humour can miss the mark also. Nowhere is it more misplaced than Never Not Rock, which sounds like it comes from a dumb metal version of Never Stop Never Stopping written by Andy Dwyer from Mouse Rat. 

ThunderBlood is at their best when they’re not trying too hard to be clever or funny: No One Left puts the dark vocal style to best use with a Gothic metal feel and What You Want features a gnarly riff and some tasty lead guitar work, which, to be fair, is pretty good across the album. Closing track Cruel Ruin proves that ThunderBlood can really put together a dark and convincing metal song when they set their minds to the task. This is probably the direction ThunderBlood need to pursue, because at the moment there’s only about ⅓ of an album of decent material on The Final Beginning – whatever that means – and I’ve just named those three.

Get ThunderBlood on iTunes