What hurts this album is already known. There is no “Scrape.” But how was “Scrape,” musically speaking, different from any of their other songs? It’s just the memorable video that will forever haunt the men of Unsane. What a shame too, because Blood Run is my favorite album of theirs because every song stands out to me. Unsane have always had the same sound; violence incarnate. They use graphic real blood album art. The lyrics should only come from the mind of a tough guy gone murderer. Most impressively they push the distortion and noise with harmony boundary to create vivid moods. This time it all seems to converge creating one vivid tale after another.”Backslide” is too true to its name, an early misstep, and backslide, down into mediocre (but not bad) song territory. Then they “Release” the fury. Vincent Signorelli’s sponsorship-nightmare pounding drives a fully realized bass (Dave Curran) and guitar (Chris Spencer) smash-your-face-while-banging-your-head anthem. Taking the tempo down, but certainly not the intensity, “Killing Time” is a bass lover’s dream. Dave Curran’s bass sends shivers down your spine which is then punctuated with an equally eerie guitar riff. This song should be on a soundtrack to a movie because it conveys the mood and confusion of a killer excellently. Is there remorse hidden in those raucous guitar swells? Great imagery in music is an insultingly underrated skill. From the second “D-Train” starts you know this song is about a train. The bass and guitar chug over the sturdy-as-steel drum line creating the perfect song to put on while standing in front of a train. Unsane continues through the entire Blood Run maintaining their ferocity while changing tempo, mood and influence to avoid monotony. And then the tidal wave of “Dead Weight,” one of the heaviest hypnotic epilogues to an album ever.

Somehow Unsane has become different in my eyes. I have always liked them, but never truly “felt” them. Blood Run has changed that. I had glimpses of it in the past, the harmonica in “Alleged” being the most obvious clue, but it’s finally hit home. This isn’t metal; it’s just pissed off blues.

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