Dustbloom
Keeping the Black Dog at Bay
Self-Released
Street: 07.08
Dustbloom = The Dillinger Escape Plan + Meshuggah

Dustbloom are a hodgepodge of pieces and tokens from all over metal’s map of subgenres. Sure, they’re primarily punk-infused metalcore, but they occasionally toss in a few prog-metal elements on “Bystander,” a couple of blaring doom metal rhythms on “Vowelphabet” and “Empty Deck,” with the vocalist constantly trading off hardcore screaming with quiet, Deftones-styled compressed vocals on most of the tracks. The advantage that this album has is that it is incredibly diverse, especially considering today’s domain of local metal bands, most of which are boilerplate and repurpose the same structures over and over. However, the double-edged sword with having too many variables is coming off as a jack of all trades yet master of none. Even though this album is thoroughly good, I’m more interested to see where Dustbloom’s stylistic preferences will head once the band fully matures. –Gregory Gerulat