Review of The Legion - A Bliss to Suffer

Curiosity got the best of me when I signed up for this one, the third full length from The Legion. Their drummer, Emil Dragutinovic, is also in Devian (and once in Marduk), a band who I’ve had my eye on the past couple years. All I really knew of them is that they were more of a blackened death metal band, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but decided to check it out – wish I would have just passed now.

A Bliss to Suffer is hardly more than an endless barrage of blast beats, with an entirely too high drum mix, dominating the sound. Some people prefer this sort of thing, but for myself, it’s pretty high up on the pet peeve list. I think it’s fucking headache inducing. To make matters even worse, the run time is nearly 50 minutes – I’m lucky if I can get through 15-20 without feeling like I lost a bunch of brain cells. This is a slight exaggeration of course, because they do provide some respite from the blasting here and there (“A Toil Beneath the Skin”, “A Curse for the Dead”, a brief middle section in “The Luring Depths” and parts of “The Reaping of Flesh and Blood”).

So, the drums are virtually non-stop annoying blasts – what about the guitars and everything else? Well, the tone is really dirty and gnarly sounding, but also a little on the thin side, with several good riffs scattered throughout, and there are bits of evil/haunting melodic leads as well, most noticeably in the first couple tracks, “Shining Redemption”, “Call of the Nameless Black”, and album closer “The Reaping of Flesh and Blood”. There is no bass of course, and the vocals of Lazr Martinsson are firmly rooted in the raspy blackened style, with not a lot of variation. They make great use of atmospherics by way of keys on most of the tracks here as well.

So that’s it. I don’t see much reason to dive into this unless of course you just love everything black metal, or like being beaten mercilessly into submission for an hour at a time.