Vision of Disorder’s guitarist, Mike Kennedy, and vocalist, Tim Williams, join together after the collapse of VOD to compose a mind and heart crushing heavy metal album under the band name Bloodsimple. A Cruel World is an excursion into the insurmountable pains of self-pity and alienation in the present United States, drowning in a pool of hatful affectations, rained out by machine guns and bombs in Iraq in “Straight Hate,” and the puddles of American greed and capitalist fashions that splash “Blood in Blood Out” and “Falling Backwards.”
A Cruel World is much like any metal album, full of ear cracking screams, rapid-fire-double-pedal bass drum kicks, breakneck distorted guitar riffs, and an excessive use of the first-person singular pronoun. Bloodsimple performs every one of these expectations of the metal music genre and makes them explode with energy and, more particularly, with empathy. From the first line of A Cruel World to the last, Williams reflects both about himself or the listener and never without the tint of some negative emotional state—anger, depression, loneliness or psychological illness.
In “The Leaving Song,” Williams engages in a typical love-lost song—“All the things you put me through / All the hopeless nights I tried to make it right for you”—with a chest breaking emotion, created by and exaggerated by a slow dramatic metal band accompaniment. “Sell Me Out” responds to a similar feeling of betrayal and loss: “You’re all my heart, my flesh and blood / Night’s so lonely without you around me.”
The album carries desperation beyond the limits of hopelessness. “Running from Nothing” holds the subject of paranoia in a tight mental grip: “What’s out tonight calling to nothing… / It’s all in my head everything is done, everything is gone.” Depressing self-delusions, like this one, pervade A Cruel World creating a mood that far exceeds melancholy and verges on clinical depression. The inescapable negative lyrical clutch of the album performs an opposite function from the fast-paced rhythms and speedy and ornamented guitar lines; A Cruel World is overflowing with depressive lyrical material and quickly slows down the emotional pace of the listener.
A Cruel World is the perfect album for a day of self loathing, but in any other circumstance, it screams against better judgments for mental health. Bloodsimple’s screeching sound will keep you awake and jumpy for hours, but all you’ll want to do is lie on a remote couch and pass into a coma.
