This isn't a bad album, if all you want out of music is that it sound exactly like the Hatebreed and Sick of It All and Full Blown Chaos albums you already own. Thick as Blood are thick, all right, mostly between the ears. They're from Miami, but they sound straight out of Long Island, playing muscleheaded metalcore with all the crunchy riffs, hammering drums, and pit-inciting breakdowns any surly teenaged boy could ever want. The trouble is, they don't offer anything else, and don't give the impression that they've ever had an original musical idea. Songs like "All or Nothing," "Raising Hell," "Selective Senses," and the rest are not only indistinguishable from one another, they're all basically rewrites of the catalogs of the bands that built this genre, starting in the late '80s. The lyrics are all about feeling betrayed by lying outsiders, or the flip side of that -- the unity of hardcore brotherhood. There is one moderately interesting track -- the interlude "Horizons," a decent melancholy riff and a distorted sample of someone giving a speech somewhere. That, too, has been done a thousand times before, but at least it provides a brief break from all the testosterone-poisoned chest-beating on display for the rest of Embrace's half-hour running time. Admittedly, the production is nice, but how much of this stuff does any one person need?
© Phil Freeman /TiVo