First thing’s first; great cover.Now, I really wanted to like Bleeding Through’s third album. I really wanted it to be a huge middle finger to metalheads that look down on Bleeding Through with disdain and I wanted The Truth to remove Bleeding Through from the hated Hotopicore trifecta that also includes Avenged Sevenfold and Atreyu. But alas, The Truth ends up keeping them firmly entrenced in the world of eye liner, mass produced black shirts and angsty teen popularity.

That being said, The Truth is not a bad album, especially if you are one of the said teens or an open minded metal head not afraid to admit liking this style of music. To their credit, Bleeding Through, with essentially a new lineup from their debut, haven’t tried to recreate the thunderously heavy Portrait of a Goddess, instead finding their niche within the current popular metalcore/thrash trend and they do it well. However, The Truth doesn’t do anything markedly different from This is Love, This is Murderous; the pace is often very uptempo and urgent, almost forcibly so, and Marta’s keyboards give them a bit of a Goth personality beneath the brooding exterior, but ultimately the tracks are a rather repetitive mix of thrashing metal, ballads, breakdowns and shouted verse, clean chorus, shouted verse prose that gets predictable.

Opening with the “I don’t give a fuck!” line of the impressively aggressive “For Love and Falling” (This albums “On Wings of Lead”?), The Truth tries almost too hard to be far more ‘metal’ than it really is-and that applies to the whole album. In fact the opening trio of “For Love and Falling”, “Confession” and “Love in Slow Motion” follow a all to similar but admittedly aggressive pattern that hints at Bleeding Through being an all out thrash band. “The Pain Killer” breaks up the pace a bit with Marta being a little more up-front and the song’s gait being a bit less predictable (verse/chorus/ verse) and angular. But then “Kill to Believe” returns to the albums early, almost forced levels of mixed repetitive aggression and clean choruses. It’s not bad at all, just rather indistinguishable.

There is a few moments that break the mold such as the haunting chorus of “Dearly Beheaded”, the ballad, “Line in the Sand”, Marta’s black metal tinkering of “She’s Gone” and the moody closing instrumental title track, but they only litter a rather uninspired album with some definable highlights. Otherwise, the album is basically the recipe of the first three tracks repeated over and over ( “Tragedy of Empty Streets”, “Return to Sender”, Hollywood Prison”). This may impress painted nail teens and black clad girls wanting to annoy their parents, but for the true metalhead its all a bit superficial and well… faux. I’m not questioning Bleeding Through’s desire or ability, but their target audience obviously isn’t you or I, and I cant fault that.

All that being said, I don’t hate the album or dislike it-I have no real emotion about it either way, it’s just….another Bleeding Through album that will make some noise in Billboard and Soundscan, and more power to them, but personally I expected and wanted more.

[Visit the band's website]

---

Comments