LightningRider Disfiguring the Goddess is my favorite slam band. This one man act might be underground, but he's known for including weird and creepy electronic in most of his albums. After a six-year hiatus, however, he went for more straight-up, typical slam. And since slam death is such a repetitive and monotonous genre, one could say he sold himself out.

Blood Animal acts as a follow-up to the 2020 EP Sooth, which is a return to form featuring electronic elements with a stronger ambient touch. The album was engaging and short, and I expected something similar from Blood Animal. However, the ambient and electronic was a bit weakened, as if DTG was attempting to reach a middle point between his style and the more typical brand of slam death. As a result, the album carries only a little progression and isn't very engaging. Thanks to its small amount of variety, it's still a better album than the boring hiatus-breaker, Katapillar. But most of the songs have the same basic goal in mind and follow the same tempo, which can get monotonous quickly. Add the fact that this is the longest album in DTG's catalog, and one realizes that this could have been so much better and done so easily.

Has DTG really run out of ideas? Or is he just trying to increase his status as a "real" brutal death metal act by steering more into the typical side? Either way, this album, while fairly enjoyable for anyone who likes brutal death metal, is still weak in comparison to the weird outings of Disfiguring the Goddess, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for any reason.