10 YEAR REUNION: Blood Stain Child - Epsilon

It's a thing alright

Okay so it's less than ten years old, fight me.  I'm choosing to jump way ahead and redo something outside the purview of this series less because the original review was written poorly (though I definitely did that "lol japan so wacky" thing that I've grown to despise), but because while homophobia wasn't my intent when writing it, I definitely leaned on some insensitive tropes when trying to describe how sugary and poppy this album is.  I didn't really want to do the performative self flagellation thing, but I just know some smartass is going to bring it up so I'm getting ahead of it.  Eat my balls.

Epsilon is a weird album, though I suppose that was obvious from just a passing glance.  Take a look at that Waifu Fantasy XIII aesthetic and whatever music popped into your head probably wasn't too far from the truth.  This is the dumbest shit in the world, with effort-free pop melodies and exuberant dance beats taking up the lion's share of the runtime, usually slathered liberally over the top of punchy melodeath.  The dudes from Disarmonia Mundi contribute guest vocals on a few tracks, and man that just makes so much sense since what I remember of that shitty band was basically this exact kind of not-metalcore-but-the-exact-niche-of-melodeath-that-metalcore-always-rips-off.  That describes most of the heavy elements at play within Epsilon.  The drums are louder than the guitars by a pretty huge magnitude and it's produced to be weirdly trebly, and it does create a neat effect with the electronic elements by never being beefy enough to truly clash, it does tend to cause the cymbals to sound like a neverending fog of white noise in the background.  It winds up being more of a bap than a boom, punching through the sonic center with gusto whenever the percussion picks up.  People smarter than I am tell me that the non-metal elements at play here belong to a subgenre known as "trance", but that's way out of my wheelhouse as a guy who listened to an Infected Mushroom album once before going back to my Slayer records so I'll just take their word for it.

But despite the overwhelming amount of sugar and pop sensibility on top of aggressive melodeath, the actual weirdest part about this album is the fact that it actually wound up being solidly decent.  In fact I think it's enjoyable despite the gimmicky genre clashing, because the songs that are the clearest attempt at blending the two sides of the band's coin 50/50 wind up pretty awkward.  "Eternal" is a great example, with this cute animu girl cooing sweetly over blastbeats just sounding confused and odd for the sake of it.  There are four songs here I genuinely think are great that I've gone back to listen to plenty over the years, and they're split pretty cleanly between the light and heavy sides of the band.  "Sirius IV" and "LA+" focus much more on punchy and aggressive metal, while "Stargazer" and "Moon Light Wave" are basically pure electronic dance pop with guitars vaguely gesturing at distortion in the background.  That's not to say that they're only good when they're picking a side, "Dedicated to Violator" is a very un-metal track and it does absolutely nothing for me, but the hooks on the two aforementioned happy dance songs are phenomenal.  I've never really bothered listening to the rest of Blood Stain Child's catalog but a part of me really hopes they kinda just ditched metal altogether because "Stargazer" is far and away the best track on here and it's the one that flirts with metal the least awkwardly. 

Oddly enough there isn't much to say about this, really.  It's melodeath + trance and that's pretty much the beginning and end of it.  Some of it is surprisingly great and even the lame songs have some pretty infectious hooks, but there's no denying that the styles are pretty abrasive when it comes to actually comingling with one another.  It's a novel oddity that spits out a few surprisingly good tracks with "Stargazer" and "Moon Light Wave" but most of it is honestly just transparent filler.  The good songs are good enough to keep me coming back throughout the years but never for much longer than a quick sightseeing tour before going back to other bands that at least blended their disparate ideas more cohesively.

RATING: 59%