I have always had a special place in my heart for Bloodbath. It’s been debated whether or not the band was ever truly a side project or has always been a fully-staffed and supported band. Either way, they have put out 3 brutal albums and 2 EPs, filled with gore and guts and death wishes.

Vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt (of Opeth fame) gives the band that push over the edge from mediocre run of the mill gore-core band to Incredible death metal that makes you wish you really were dead. They make being dead sound like a party.

The have a new album out along with the above pictured Wacken live CD. Listen to 3 new tracks off of their latest album on their MySpace page and then go hack off a coworker’s arm with an axe (or just imagine it). Or, watch them destroy Wacken ’08 while covered in gore themselves (gets rolling about 1:30 in):

All Shall Perish screams Halloween. Literally scream, obviously. I group these guys with Whitechapel and Suicide Silence as my 3 favorite Death Metal/Metalcore/Grindcore/Brutal Breakdown Metal/YouCrossTooManyStyles bands to which I compare any new potential band in that genre before adding them to permanent rotation in my music player. It’s just purely brutal and technically magnificent without having a lot of the cheese and over-emphasis on ridiculous technicality and mathematics that suffers a lot of death metal bands these days.

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