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For Faen! (2013) is the third full-length album by Norwegian thrash metal act Blood Tsunami. It’s been a few years since the release of their last album Grand Feast for Vultures (2009) and the band line-up has seem a small change with the bass position changing from Pete Boström to Carl Janfalk. This marks the first line-up change for the band since between their early demos.
The line-up may not look much different, but it’s about the only thing that hasn’t seen some revision on For Faen! This is a much shorter album than either of the two previous releases of the group, whose career of making full-lengths began with the aptly named Thrash Metal (2007). While the earlier albums tended to feature mostly mid-length to long songs, including some that passed by the ten minute mark, For Faen! features a much more to the point style of song writing with the longest song here being The Brazen Bull at 4:45 (this is also one of the best songs on the album). A few of the songs don’t even hit the two minute mark, Dogfed clocking in at 1:33.
The actual music has also changed. It’s still thrash metal, but the influences of other styles that crept into Blood Tsunami’s music previously are all but gone. Most notably For Faen! is absent of the death metal elements of previous releases. The music has still got a very slight blackened edge, but for the most part this is a pure thrash metal album. A really angry and aggressive no frills attached sounding thrash metal album to be precise. I’m not sure what has happened in the Blood Tsunami camp in the last few years, but they certainly sound pissed off about something! The vocals of Pete Evil are also now more in line with thrash standards compared to the growling/screaming heard on Grand Feast for Vultures, which only serves to make the album sound even more aggressive.
Whether these changes within Blood Tsunami are ultimately a good or a bad thing depends on your perspective. If a more focused sound works for you then For Faen! may come across as the group’s strongest effort yet, but if you preferred the more varied blackened thrash/death metal sound of Grand Feast for Vultures it may then come across as a weaker release. I can’t say that generally speaking either of these approaches trumps the other one for me, which fortunately allows me to evaluate the album on more neutral ground. On that note while I do think that For Faen! is a good thrash metal album, I don’t think it manages to quite live up to the merits of its predecessor. It is of course good that Blood Tsunami have the ability in them to make a very different sounding album without abandoning their core genre but the end result does seem a little regressive to my ears. If I was completely unfamiliar with Blood Tsunami and someone played me Grand Feast for Vultures and For Faen! back to back I’d probably incorrectly guess that For Faen! was the earlier, less developed album.
It seems pretty obvious that the intent was to do an album a bit different this time and while I can give Blood Tsunami full marks for making a success of that, at the end of the day I do think they were better at what they did before. A good album tier rating is deserved, but I don’t think I’d like to see the band continue in this direction.
71/100
(originally written for Heavy Metal Haven (http://metaltube.freeforums.org/blood-tsunami-for-faen-t2907.html))