Band:	Blood Red Throne
Album:	Union Of Flesh And Machine
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	July 15, 2016
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Revocation Of Humankind
02. Proselyte Virus
03. Patriotic Hatred
04. Homicidal Ecstacy
05. Martyrized
06. Union Of Flesh And Machine
07. Legacy Of Greed
08. Exposed Mutation
09. Primal Recoil
10. Leather Rebel [Judas Priest cover]
11. Mary Whispers Of Death

Basically Just Death Metal?: now with 100% more death metal.

Blood Red Throne reminds me a lot of Dew-Scented, a personal favorite and one of the standards by which I tend to measure death and death/thrash: the idea behind a song comes secondary to the brutality with which that song can be played. Also, this kind of sounds like Dew-Scented, so there's that. Union Of Flesh And Machine does produce some interesting riff ideas, but this album unquestioningly prizes sound over substance. What a powerful sound it is, though - only the most Swedish of guitar tones, utterly guttural growls, and a lethal precision that makes Union Of Flesh And Machine feel exactly like what the title describes. Everything about Union Of Flesh And Machine is rapid-fire, calculated, and precise. The riffs jump back and forth between winding, organic passages and blocky, crushing heaps of distortion; every song bristles with furious energy that makes the album a roaring freight train.

This is the kind of thing I love to come back to after a stressful day. You don't need to waste any time in contemplation or analysis to determine the goal of the album; it's just an unstoppable wall of sound, a brutal, mechanical onslaught of harsh tones, sharp licks, and barreling battalions of battery. Maybe you won't remember any of these songs five minutes after you've moved on to the next album (although "Martyrized" and "Patriotic Hatred" in particular are pretty badass), but who cares? Melodies are for the weak. Death metal deals in pain. All a riff has to do is carry you to the morgue and back. It doesn't have to take you to dinner or bake you cookies or give you anything to sing along to.

Union Of Flesh And Machine definitely has enough new ideas to make it interesting the first time around, but at its heart, this album doesn't venture beyond a particular kind of death metal that we've all heard many times before. For the most part, the songs kind of run in and out of each other. I don't hold this quality against the album at all, since as far as pure atmosphere goes, Union is a powerful and dominating presence that I'd be perfectly happy listening to over and over again, and that quality is worth a lot of points. Union may be basically just death metal, but that was never a bad thing.