Trigger the Bloodshed – Degenerate (2010) 

As a snake shedding its skin, today we have Trigger the Bloodshed shedding its Deathcore skin and showing us their new Technical/Brutal Death Metal side. Album after album, this band has been making small progress into crafting a powerful and brutal sound that does not sound weak or cloned.

With “Degenerate”, Trigger the Bloodshed provides us 36 minutes of catchy-yet-brutal Death Metal that will make you want to headbang since minute 1 of this album. The band has paid more attention to the songwriting aspect of “Degenerate” and has crafted songs that are cohesive and well designed to exploit the heavy riffing and inhuman vocals.

Kicking things off with “A Vision of Showing Nothing”, Trigger the Bloodshed’s riff machine starts on a high-note and paired with blistering drumming we can’t stop thinking that “Degenerate” will be an in-your-face kick-ass album. The growls are deep and aggressive providing the extra level of brutality to an already strong song.

Much like the first song, the whole album goes from one brutal track on to the next one without ever stopping for a gasp of air, and we love this. There are some guitar acrobatics in the way of occasional solos, but nothing too extreme to take the focus away from the core brutality behind “Degenerate”. The band has shed most of it’s Deathcore influences, but you can still listen to some hints here and there, we think that they have done an even better job than bands such as Whitechapel in terms of moving over to the ‘real metal’ category.

As you can expect from a DM release, it will get a bit repetitive after a while, but Trigger the Bloodshed has enough simple tempo changes and adjustments to not like plenty of other ‘newer’ DM bands. The whole album flows quickly and effectively, and since it clocks only 36 minutes we get the right single-sitting serving of brutality.

We can only expect good things from Trigger the Bloodshed in the future, and for now “Degenerate” will surely please all the bands fans and the Brutal DM listeners that have never heard of them before. With 9 crushing tracks, “Degenerate” will surely be in our Death Metal’s top 10 albums of 2010.

Release: August 24th, 2010

Country: UK