It seems to me that Peaceville Records is spending a lot more time and money on the packaging of their releases lately… After the extremely cool "The Frostland Tapes" 3-CD set by DARKTHRONE and BLOODBATH’s "The Wacken Carnage" digibook, this brandnew BLOODBATH EP here is no exception once again. Apart from one of those new jewel cases (the type with the rounded off edges) it also gets delivered in an additional slipcase, has a real booklet and offers all of the lyrics… Pretty unusual for an EP, but on the other hand this could also indicate how much the label believes in this Swedish Death Metal horde ("Unblessing The Purity" is BLOODBATH’s first studio recording after their departure from Century Media Records). Musically speaking the four featured (brandnew) tracks differ quite a bit from the previous BLOODBATH releases. I’m not sure if that has to do in any way with the fact that Dan Swanö is no longer in the line-up (he got replaced by Per Eriksson), but his very old school-ish, straight and brutal, yet catchy writing style is definitely sadly missed. All of the songs on "Unblessing The Purity" are extremely fast, come up with a lot of blast-beats and remind me way more of the brutal US Death Metal style than of their originally very typical Swedish sound. Don’t get me wrong: I still think that the material is pretty amazing, but I would have preferred if the band would have continued to write more in the "tribute to old Swedish Death Metal" type direction.The production is once again very convincing (crystal clear but very crushing and brutal at the same time) and the fact that Mikael Åkerfeldt is back in the band is another big plus of course. So, let’s just wait for the next full length to see where these guys are heading to. www.peaceville.com