Providence, RI’s Howl know how to put the frighteners on listeners before they've even pressed play: The cover for their excellent self-titled, three-song debut depicted a skeleton with her hair blowing in the black wind, with angel wings sprouting beneath a pentagram. 2010's Full of Hell showed a fire-breathing figure cloaked in red and surrounded by creepy, isolated eyeballs. And now Bloodlines offers a verifiable general store of evil-- a heart spurting blood fashioned into flower blossoms, a vacant-eyed wolf snarling up at a naked woman with bleeding eyes, a skeleton wielding a spear against a background of oblivion. And in a catalog of less than two dozen total tunes, Howl have landed memorably frightening handles such as “And the Gnawing…”, “Gods in Broken Men”, “The Scorpion’s Last Sting”, and “Your Hell Begins”. You’re shuddering, right?
Bloodlines is the band’s second LP for Relapse Records, and actually works hard not to repel with fright, despite its image, titles, and lyrics rife with dismemberment, boiled blood, and sin. In fact, its mix of stoner doom, mid-level thrash, and shout-along hooks wants desperately to be loved, for its bulging choruses about “kill[ing] the light” and being torn “limb from limb” to be recited with grim glee. But Bloodlines’ attempt to be liked comes across as the desperate pandering of a band that’s not really certain of what it wants to do anymore. At the start of their career, HOWL was a righteous doom band propelled by hardcore momentum; by the time they recorded Full of Hell, they’d galvanized that mixture into a savage, head-down bluster that suggested High on Fire and was intoxicated with promise. Bloodlines shows traces of that, but the band’s roots are largely crowded out by the need to do a little bit of everything, to connect en masse in only 40 minutes. But the gambit doesn’t work, because, from end to end, HOWL now sounds like a band that’s just trying too hard.
Chris Harris, better known as Zeuss, produced Bloodlines. You might recognize his mononym from albums by God Forbid, Shadows Fall, Hatebreed, and Terror-- that is, slicker, faster stuff than that of HOWL’s past. It’s a harbinger of the trouble on Bloodlines, too, a technically accomplished album where you kind of wish the band would make a mistake. That, at least, would make them feel somewhat as dangerous as their image suggests. Instead, HOWL delivers songs with big, dumb refrains that feel rushed (“Midnight Eyes”), magpie messes that volley awkwardly between death metal and stoner rock (“With a Blade”), and flashy solos that propel the players and not the songs themselves (“Attrition”, whose intro reads like a statement of nascent professionalism). Frontman Vince Hausman screams the words to "Demonic" in his most malevolent brogue, but this is really just a middling, mid-tempo, metalcore slog. If this is intense as HOWL intended Bloodlines to get, they should have run the cover through a Lisa Frank filter.
There are, of course, moments of genuine excitement during Bloodlines: The amplified blues riff at the start of “With a Blade” is a swiveling delight, and the rhythm section pounding from one end of “Demonic” to the other delivers an enthusiastic bruising. Many of the individual performances are excellent; drummer Timmy St. Amour, for instance, sounds inexhaustible. But the album’s only complete keeper, “Down So Low”, epitomizes the flaw of Bloodlines as a whole. Whirs of noise introduce the tune, which ultimately arrives at a half-time stomp where the drums are restless and the vocals (split here between Hausman and bassist Robert Icaza) are menacing. It manages to give HOWL’s low-slung doom progenitors an invigorating jolt, and the band hammers hard enough to sound like they’re truly enjoying themselves in the coda-- a rarity on a record that seems too measured and deliberate to allow for much real delight.
