Bleeding Through - The Truth

Bleeding Through always appealed to me more than most of the other bands in the metalcore scene primarily because of their more aggressive, more straight forward speed metal like approach. In a scene that is ripe with bands hawking the latest version of the Americanized Gothenburg sound, Bleeding Through has more in common with the speed metal bands and death metal bands in terms of delivery and sheer intensity. Their previous records, 2003's 'This is Love, This is Murderous' and its more brutal predecessor, 2002's 'Portrait of the Goddess' are some of the best releases in this currently popular and saturated scene. Really, it's hard to even lump them with the majority of metalcore bands as Bleeding Through are obviously more in the metal than the core side of things. The band is reportedly Turstkills best selling band to date (shifting over 80,000), so to say the release of 'The Truth' was highly anticipated is a huge understatement. But does it live up to the hype? Well, unfortunately it doesn't. On 'The Truth', BT has streamlined their sound a bit, making the songs more straightforward that adds to the intensity of the compositions. Vocalist Brandan Schieppati (ex-Throwdown and 18 Visions) has never sounded angrier than on this record, spitting forth vile and hatred that can only come from life experiences and hardship. No fake I'm pissed that I missed the O.C. (although they do hail from Orange County), Hot Topic anger here. Derek Youngsma (drums) is in fine form here, blasting and double bass running his way though like he should have been a member of Suffocation. Guitarist Scott Danough and Brian Leppke construct heavy and brutal albeit rather simple skeletons for the songs but it works. The duo thankfully know when to slow the speed picking and triplets when its appropriate (like in instrumental title track), and songs like first single Kill to Believe and Dearly Demented are some of the best the band have done to date. Most of the appeal to the band also lie in the fact that they are one of the only bands in the scene with a keyboardist (hey, like a metalcore Nocturnus). Where previous keyboardist Molly Street would only add touches that stayed in background (she played on the last two records but left after the recording of 'This is love') current ivory twinkler Marta prefers to be more upfront and adds a more gothic, almost black metal like touch to the songs. So, why the low score than? Namely one reasons in particular. One of my gripes is the production, courtesy of Rob Caggiano (ex-Anthrax, Meatloaf). I didn't like what he did to the last Cradle of Filth and Anthrax records as his productions are too bottom heavy for my taste. Its heavy, no doubt about it, but unlike an Andy Sneap or even Adams Dutckiewicz production, the songs are nothing but heavy and don't breathe and in the end have a almost muffled like sound (almost like the last Darkane record). When every thing is tuned low, you need some sort of separation and all of Robs productions that I've heard so far lack that quality. I really would like to hear this band produced by one of the before mentioned blokes, as I think a sound like that would absolutely slay. You can clearly see a band growing and refining their craft but I don't think this is the break out record we're being sold. Add to that some truly cringe inducing clean singing and all in all the record feels a bit uncooked. I'd still take this to any of the current metalcore releases but Bleeding Through are still no quite there yet.