Album Review: Bloody Hammers - Songs Of Unspeakable Terror

For this album, Bloody Hammers are visiting their horror-punk influences, which means we're going to get short songs about monsters and violence. In a way, I envision horror-punk as being the "Evil Dead" of music; horror, yes, but also campy and a bit funny. If we were to take songs about spitting on a corpse literally, it wouldn't paint a very good picture of the people involved. But as long as it's all in good fun, we can all laugh at the absurdity. Now, I'm going to put this out at the onset of this review; last year saw the release of a horror-rock album from South Of Salem I really enjoyed, which is going to be the benchmark Bloody Hammers has to live up to.

One of the longer tracks, "A Night To Dismember" leads things off with an enjoyable little jaunt that I'm sure borrows from the same Misfits influence, but to my ears sounds very much like a Volbeat track. I don't know if it has quite the punk attitude the band is advertising, but the song does have a solid hook that's plenty of fun. That's especially true when compared to the single, "Hands Of The Ripper", where the hook is slower and lumbering, and doesn't have that same sense of fun. I get it does fit the theme of being hunted by Jack The Ripper, but it isn't as appealing a song.

I think the album gets caught between influences for much of its running time. There are punk influences, to be sure, but the album doesn't speed along with the right energy to properly be punk. At other times, it's clear the band wants to be more sinister, but that doesn't play as well with the shorter running times, nor the promises made. Some songs want to be melodic over bursts of guitars, while others want to crawl through the darkness. They don't fit together on the same album particularly well.

To get back to my benchmark, here's where this album really falls flat. That album I mentioned from South Of Salem was also telling tales and monsters, zombies, and violence, but it was done with bigger hooks, more fun, and songs that became memorable the instant you heard them. That doesn't happen with most of the songs on this record. They're fine, but neither the punk riffs (usually played with a more stoner guitar tone that dulls their edge) nor the vocal lines are going to leave that kind of mark. Put the albums side-by-side, and the difference is a chasm.

Ultimately, this album comes across as a missed opportunity. Stripping things down to the bare bones, and getting back to the roots of horror-punk, should have resulted in a tight, punchy album. Instead, we get songs that fail to deliver on either the fun, camp, or infectiousness of the best the genre has to offer. It's sort of like sitting down to watch a terrible B-movie, only to realize it's bad in a way that isn't funny. You can still find something to enjoy about it, but it's not what you wanted, and it's not all it could have been. Bloody Hammers needed more songs to make this project work.