Most Precious Blood – Merciless

This is yet another album that I nearly bought in 2005 and I now regret not buying. I should have known that this would be good either because of the “Defend Hardcore” emblem on the cover or based on the fact that I loved the previous album. Although this band says its New York hardcore, it definitely should not be confused with several other sounds coming out of that city. For instance, they may be New York hardcore, but they don’t sound anything like Gorilla Biscuits, Sick of it All, or the Cro-Mags. Most Precious Blood has more of a metal influenced hardcore sound that is becoming very common throughout the scene. They have very heavy vocals, it sounds like a harsh bark-like yell. The guitarists use ample palm mute, but they have some of the best sounding riffs I’ve heard. Although in some songs they get chuggy and the breakdown gets repetitive. The bass player has some good bass lines that can be heard over the rest of the band, which is very uncommon for most bands of the heavier sort. I should also mention the song Driving Angry, because the bass line in it is one of my favorites that I have ever heard. The drummer is excellent; he has wild double kick patterns, and adjusts his speed on the rest of his drum kit while keeping the same bass pattern. So one again, I have nothing to really complain about on this album except for the chuggy-ness in some of the breakdowns, which doesn’t bother me that much. The lyrics are really good; they seem to be about religion and violence in many of the songs. This doesn’t affect the music, but in the booklet there’s a picture of a corpse, which kind of bothered me, I’m not a big fan of corpses (it did remind me of the TSOL song Code Blue though).

If I were to be an album that someone where considering buying, I would most likely be this one. It really is worthy of my highest rating, because I enjoy it that much. There was one thing that was interesting about this album though, when I placed it in my computer, the program I was running it with claimed that there were 99 tracks on the CD. So it turns out that along with the thirteen tracks of music, there’s another 86 phone calls to random bands. What I assume to be prank calls, I never really got around to listening to many of them though, but from what I heard, they were entertaining. But I digress, what I was meaning to say was buy or burn or steal or download this album.