If you take the time to read the script of Blood for the Master, the fifth album by New Orleans death metal quartet Goatwhore, you might be intimidated. True to stylistic expectations, these 10 songs are indeed rife with deicide, genocide, apocalypse, upheaval, bloodshed, and biting. The horror-house images are occasionally compelling, too, like the loaded descriptor "bound in serpent's coil" or the suggestive "a drop of blood in water." During opener "Collapse in Eternal Worth", there's talk of perdition and sacrifice, decay and slaughter, extinction and returning "these false gods to realms of disease." Elsewhere, heavens burn, virgins bleed, underworlds hunger, massacres gratify, and zombies rise. In a brilliant moment of deadly entendre, the narrator even intends to "awake the mourning into onyx dawn."
In an age of Mediafire links and nabbed torrents, though, you're rightly asking yourself who even reads death metal lyrics-- or lyrics at all-- really? Why take the time to pore over these 2,500 words concerning demons and death when you could simply let these 38 minutes blast at high volume? Wouldn't that be more fun? Generally, yes, but Blood for the Master is such a tedious listen from a tired band that the lyrics are more entertaining than the sounds behind them. Each of these 10 verbose tracks pummels through three to four minutes of rote, static death metal, racing through the motions with an edict that suggests not the obliteration of humanity or the heavens but instead imagination itself. If reading lyrics is boring, hearing these is a step worse. Musically, Blood for the Master is bland enough to make mid-song trade-offs between singer Louis Falgoust's serrated sneer and Sammy Duet's deeper bellow newsworthy, because it pretty much encapsulates the extent of any given song's dynamic. When the two briefly shout together during "When Steel and Bone Meet", it's a cause for care that passes as quickly as it happens. And when the second side opens with a spiraling web of acoustic and electric guitars played by producer Erik Rutan, there's an instant when you might even believe Blood for the Master can save itself. It returns immediately, however, into its own morass of circumscription.
It wasn't always this way for Goatwhore: Though they've never been a great band during their 15-year tenure, they've occasionally been interesting or, at the very least, promising. In 2006, A Haunting Curse trussed touches of their homeland's scuzz to the death metal tide, while traces of sprinting grindcore and mid-tempo Motörhead added depth. Nearly three years later, Goatwhore pulled the reins for Carving Out the Eyes of God, excising some of those excess strains while still allowing for enough black metal rushes and tempo twists for some measure of unpredictability. But Blood for the Master is completely codified so that little but the basics-- a lot of thrash, a load of weak solos, a pair of vocalists who mirror more than complement each other-- survive. Goatwhore offer a glimpse of black metal at the start of "Beyond the Spell of Discontent" before returning headlong into their own orthodoxy; on "In Deathless Tradition", they at least nod to a different tempo, sinking into sludge beneath Cookie Monster imprecations.
Pretty much everywhere else, though, Goatwhore stand boldly for the boilerplate, or sounds that have been captured with more enthusiasm and adventure countless times before. For a band that's lyrically so devoted to upsetting the order, Goatwhore sound unequivocally content with replaying the past. "Praise the order of chaos," Falgoust barks at one point, just above the endless din of his ostensibly sanctimonious revivalists. Well, OK, but you first.
