Genre: Death/black metal
Origin: France
Released: 2010
Website: Bloody Sign
Label: Blood Harvest Records
Uploaded: 14.06.10

When I first heard Bloody Sign quite some years ago I wasn’t really impressed. Why everybody else seemed to think they were so good I couldn’t understand, I just found them to be another run-of-the-mill death/black band. So I’ve never bothered to check out their previous albums, and here we have a third one. Whereas I can’t tell any differences in between albums, development or progression, I can tell you they’ve definitely improved since I last heard them.
One of the first things that came to mind when Chord temple set in was how it reminded me of Revelation of Doom, with an extra dose of black metal. Shortly after that Throneum came to mind, but minus the thrash. And it didn’t take long before Dead Congregation popped up, but with less brutality and more mystical aspects. Many more acts have made a quick flash by in my library of comparisons, at one moment I even thought of Dissection. But I think that might’ve been more due to the mystical and ritual touches and not for the actual musical similarities. Nevertheless, Chaos echoes comes off as quite European sounding, with a flair of both North and South America (a little of both Incantation and Infinitum Obscure). The base of it all feels like pretty straight forward old school death, but with a more sinister approach. It’s more than a mere hail to the Scandinavian or Floridian scene (for instance), but like taking a classic recipe and bastardizing the hell out of it. They do that by adding some modern twists to their sound, and a load of black metal harshness.
Drum-wise they offer a wide variety of patterns, a lot of them highly unorthodox. They also spruce things up with tons of tempo changes and weird semi-ritualistic instrumental sections, all of which adds to the unorthodox and mystical flair of it all. Bloody Sign also presents quite lethal riffing, but with all this power there’s still something that keeps me from being engulfed by it. They do everything right, but I just can’t seem to feel the full impact. I don’t know why, I should love it, but for some reason I stop at just liking it. The only thing that truly bugs me with the album are the fucked up Roman numerals in the tracklist (4 is written as IIII and 9 as VIIII). Other than that it’s pretty much all good, so don’t take my hesitation to hail Chaos echoes as a masterpiece the wrong way.

Tracklist:
01. Intro
02. Chord temple
03. Down to hell
04. For the unknown
05. Voices from the depths
06. The call
07. Primordial sound
08. Symphony of bones
09. Words of death
10. Khordê's funerals
11. Tongues of shadow
12. Outro