BIOGENESIS - The Mark Bleeds Through

BIOGENESIS

The Mark Bleeds Through

Rowe Productions

2001

Biogenesis is a band from Dayton, Ohio here in the States that, for what I could gather from my investigations on the Internet, is still active. They only released this one album of theirs - The Mark Bleeds Through - which was released on Rowe Productions, and thus-far there hasn't been much word on any more material being released in the near future.*

The music on The Mark Bleeds Through, I would describe as kind of a mid-paced thrash sound, almost a groove metal, post-thrash thing. Very plodding, doomy and heavy. There are some monster riffs going on here, which does get my head nodding along. The thing that sets the band apart, is the vocalist's ability to go from a deep baritone symphonic style, almost reminiscent of Saviour Machine's Eric Clayton, or even Virgin Black's style, to a thrash scream and growling when needed. This is definitely not cookie-cutter metal here.

Probably the biggest letdown while listening to this disc is the notable lack of guitar solos. Most of the music consists of heavy, downtuned riffing, with breaks that just scream for a good shredding solo. Apparently, again from my investigations on the interwebs (Google is awesome), the producer decided, for some reason, to cut out the solos in a misguided attempt to make the band sound more like Disturbed. That sucks. Why do producers do that? This would have really been a massive release had they just not tinkered with it to get a "sound-alike" band. But, regardless, The Mark Bleeds Through is a decent listen, pretty heavy and dark. It does suffer from that missing element to really push the music over the edge into awesomeness. Regardless, worth a look at.

[*NOTE: After typing this up, I came across information that, yes, they did happen to break up, with one of the members going on to join Jacob's Dream, with the material for what would have been their second release available online to check out; I was thrown by the Metal Archives site, which had their status listed as "active", which teaches me that I shouldn't always take the normally reliable site as gospel truth, there - Uncle NecRo]