Blight House - Blight the Way

Angry Metal Guy

It’s a well-known tenet of music reviewing that middling records are the hardest to review. Part of that is due to the fact that mid records tend to blend into the crowd, offer insufficient quality or personality, or fail to make a memorable experience. Therefore, it’s difficult to conjure up 700 words and change to describe and judge it. As a reviewer of five years now,¹ this truth only gains greater prevalence as the number of records I cover pile up. However, there are outliers to the rule. These albums become incredibly difficult to write about either because you struggle to find anything good about it at all (Blut), you wish to avoid hurting a hardworking band (Idiot Robot), or because there’s too much awesomeness to cover in the allotted space (The Drowning). This review of Blight the Way, the sophomore record of Rhode Island’s gross deathgrind duo Blight House, is one such outlier.

On the surface, Blight House sounds very much like a classic death metal and grindcore mashup, biased towards the caveman and gore variety of each genre, respectively, and then filtered through a raw and grimy production (think later Darkthrone mixed with Bloodgutter). Scooped guitars similar to Bloodgutter’s chug along at a stomping pace while subterranean gutturals trade tongues with phlegmy rasps very reminiscent of Darkthrone or Griiim, a pummeling and varied kit performance driving everything inexorably forward. In songwriting approach, Blight the Way reminds me of Exhumed, albeit slower, simplified and less refined. Simple, foolproof tunes are this album’s backbone and you’ll find that, whether you love or hate the material itself, a surprising percentage of it will, somehow, get stuck in your head.

Blight the Way by Blight House

Unfortunately, I belong to the latter group who feels little love for this record, because it’s a mess. Most of the riffs on display amount to base chugging, and sometimes those riffs feel either ill-fitting, clumsy, or dropped in without much consideration given to transition (“Dismembers Only,” “Cryptid Cutie,” “Acephalophilia III – Hopelessly Headless for You”). Goofy puns and off-the-wall gutter/gore humor rule the roost on Blight the Way, as expected, but most of this content bounces off me (“Walpurgis Date-Night,” “Grassquatch”) or makes me cringe (“Cryptid Cutie,” “Bible-Belt Baby Buffet”). Furthermore, the sonic experience is weird. Drums sometimes sound appropriately weighty (“Dismembers Only”) and other times flimsy (“Florida Man Hails Satan”). The same fate befalls the guitars, which boast big crunch one moment (“Death Will Not Be Enough”) but feel toothless the next (“Too Ugly to Live, Too Dumb to Die”). The weird part is that I don’t suspect these inconsistencies to be production issues, but rather ill-conceived songwriting choices that negatively impact how I perceive the individual pieces of each track. Notably, the bass guitar is by far the most consistent, burbling with a stout presence that takes advantage of every second it’s given.

Considering the negatives so far covered, it’s somewhat mysterious that so many bits and pieces Blight the Way get into my brain without my enthusiastic consent. In one example, guest vocals featured in “Too Ugly to Live, Too Dumb to Die” (courtesy of one Glumi UwUhammer) nail the eerie ethereal horror vibe, using that connection to gain purchase.² In another instance, despite the fact that I hate the chorus to “Bible-Belt Baby Buffet,” I still find myself growling it in the kitchen, of all places. Elsewhere, a couple cool ideas show potential that, if realized, could inspire a much-improved third record. Tracks like “Florida Man Hails Satan” and “Death Will Not Be Enough” offer adequate songwriting competency and variety in approach, bolstered by a chunk of the ineffable rabidity I expect from deathgrind, to briefly move the needle from “when will it end” into “I can work with this.”

Now we come to the hard part, an aspect of reviewing music that I have come to dislike the most: scoring. There is some measure of potential here, and Blight House clearly had a ton of fun making this short and scuzzy platter. But most of the time, I simply never enjoyed myself nor wished to come back once it was over. Listening to ninety percent of this album was difficult and at times painful. Sadly, the remaining ten percent which did leave a somewhat positive impression wasn’t enough to save it from harsh critique.

Rating: Embarrassing
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Syrup Moose Records
Websites: blighthouse.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/blighthouse
Releases Worldwide: August 4th, 2023

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