Album review: Bring Me The Horizon – Count Your Blessings | Repented

With nostalgia becoming an increasingly lucrative commodity, there’s an assumption that the bands whose records were synonymous with a certain era are keen on revisiting their creations. That certainly wasn’t the case for a long while with Bring Me The Horizon and Count Your Blessings – a record arguably with as many detractors as devotees upon its release in 2006.

While fans were drawn to its volcanic ambition, ferocity and even its flaws, the Sheffield titans couldn’t wait to put some distance between themselves and their debut album via ever more ambitious and artistic creations. Until more recently, that is, thereby making its popularity hotter than the glass of a sauna thermometer.

Despite being a band who always look to the future, to celebrate Count Your Blessings’ 20th anniversary, BMTH have re-recorded it to rectify their two decades-long dissatisfaction with the original results due to budget constraints, time limitations, and, in Dan Sprigg, a producer for whom this style of music was about as familiar as trekking the surface of the moon.

This isn’t so much revisionism as a re-rendering to be more in line with the band’s intended vision, by musicians now armed with the resources and abilities to truly do it justice. In other, lesser hands that could result in feckless folly or a tiresome exercise in self-indulgence, but these perfectionists have created a very clever piece of fan service (giving something to listeners desperate to hear Horizon in this old-school heavy mode in 2026, while fixing an album they’ve always wanted to is a definite win-win).

The results are impressive – overhauled but not overdone, the quality of the sonics and mixing are in keeping with the high standards we’ve come to expect over the course of the band’s discography, though still true to this being a deathcore record. Some songs benefit more from this treatment than others, though, insofar as some songs were better the first time around. Pray For Plagues, Black & Blue and Off The Heezay remain absolute bangers, but they’re armour-plated ones now.

Despite this new version’s ‘Repented’ subtitle and Oli Sykes pondering the possibility in interviews, the lyrics that have historically been deemed misogynistic by some remain intact. Whatever one might think of those words, they are reflective of Oli’s headspace during the making of Count Your Blessings – the raw, angry, naive utterances of a kid, effectively. That doesn’t excuse it, to those who take issue, but it does contextualise it. Plus, there’s something interesting about having the 39-year-old frontman redoing his vocals – their superb technical proficiency taking nothing away from their passion – to revisit the lyrics of his teenage self.

The inclusion of new closing track Dehumanized therefore acts as something of an addendum to reflect how much BMTH have grown up. Musically it’s very much in line with the tone of the record, i.e. it’s a brutal barrage, but more sophisticated in its construction.

Dehumanized was inspired by the band being warned that having Palestinian flags on stage at Reading Festival would likely have serious consequences for their career. In lyrics like, ‘Some of us are butchers, some of us are lambs / Send me to the abattoir, let’s find out which I am’, it examines our ease with suffering and the suppression of our humanity.

Count Your Blessings | Repented is the ultimate version of a beloved record that birthed a community and a new generation of heavy bands. What’s more, it features a new song that confirms that Bring Me The Horizon can slip in and out of writing in this style at will. Now that’s an exciting prospect.

Rating: 4/5

For fans of: Architects, Parkway Drive, Motionless In White

Count Your Blessings | Repented is out now via Sony. Pre-order your limited-edition Count Your Blessings zine now.

Read this next:

• Who are Bring Me The Horizon’s fans?
• Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes: “We want to be progressive; we want to be weird; we don’t want to be a regular band”
  
• Oli Sykes: “I still feel like the underdog… But it’s important to stop smell the roses, and to be like, ‘This is f*cking amazing, what we’ve achieved’”