Soul Descenders - Destruction for Tomorrow (2007)

 

Cost: $2.00

The cover immediately gave me flashbacks of drawing simple cityscapes as part of a linear perspective assignment in high school art class (vanishing points, anyone?). While I support the concept of the hastily-sketched city getting nuked, the cloud looks more like a tree.  It's all just extremely amateurish, like art that should be on a demo CD-R limited to 25 copies.  I felt a little better after seeing the Motörhead and Slayer shirts in the band pics, but unfortunately in some ways the cover is very fitting.

This is thrash that's neither particularly classic sounding, and nor is it terribly modern sounding (thankfully). There's some stylistic variety here, with some parts having quite punky speed and others being somewhat groovy, but the songs themselves aren't terribly memorable.  Mostly it seems like an unfocused take on various tropes taken from AJFA/Black Album-era Metallica--thrashier sections are used to bridge slower, groovier sections that I wouldn't really call pure thrash themselves, and two successive tracks have acoustic intros that are very evocative of "One" or "Nothing Else Matters."

What further brings this down are the vocals--the band are young and unfortunately it really shows in the singing. The clean vox verge on whiny and sound like something that would much better fit a pop-punk or emo band. The only popular comparison I can really think to draw is Gerard Way, although I was shocked that some of the vocal patterns in "Foul Mouth" reminded me of the NWOBHM band A-II-Z. I suppose the guy realized his singing was kind of wimpy and lacking in aggression, as there are some horrible attempts at forced aggro vocals which are even worse. It's no wonder my favorite track on this album is the instrumental. 

Despite the hokey cover, lyrics, and vocals, the musicianship is pretty competent even if it's not always to my taste, although I don't feel it's used for anything great. Based on them being able to scrape together a few decent thrash riffs and due to the scarcity of the disc, I'll say this is a decent find for the price. But it's definitely more like school battle of the bands metal than serious thrash.

BrainDead - Behind the Mask of Sanity (2012)

Cost: $1.00

The bandname and album title on the spine piqued my interest on the shelf, but the style of the outer packaging and the odd capitalization of the tracklist made me question if this was metal (I'll admit I totally missed the "NEW YORK METAL" on the inside of the back insert, although that would probably make me suspect some modernized -core crap).  I felt far more confident after looking it up online, so I snagged it, and here we are.

Initially I was pleasantly surprised since the disc is actual death metal, with a large chunk of the tracks having some degree of black metal influence in the riffage as well. There are also some extra elements and flourishes here and there like samples and use of piano/keyboards. It's nothing intrusive but it feels like they were added as monotony distractors rather than integrated into the music in a meaningful way. 2 of the interlude tracks and some more shreddy moments may point towards more progressive DM aspirations, but they're never really built upon. On the plus side, I found the faster, thrashier stuff like "5 Dimensional Apprehension" and "A Warm Embrace" to be pretty enjoyable. Still, several songs and the entire CD itself itself (72 min.) are just way too long for what's presented here. If this had been pared down to a mini-CD with 3 or 4 of the better tracks, I could more enthusiastically recommend it as being pretty generic but enjoyable. At this length it's a pretty tough slog through the entire thing without getting ear fatigue. A little disappointing in that aspect but overall an OK find for a buck.

Cannibal Corpse, Death, Morbid Angel CDs - Canadian pressings

Found these three death metal CDs, all Canadian pressings, for $2 each.  Nothing I haven't heard already but the price was right.

Cannibal Corpse - Gallery of Suicide

Not a huge Cannibal fan to begin with, and even then, I'd say I greatly prefer the Barnes era. This is one of the best Corpsegrinder albums though, and probably my overall personal favorite out of his era of the band.

 

Death - Individual Thought Patterns

I recently picked up some other later Death CDs too, but since they aren't Canadian pressings and I'm certainly not in any hurry to listen to The Sound of Perseverance, I'll save those for a future post. I very rarely listen to Death at all beyond the Leprosy era, and when I do, it's either live stuff or occasionally putting on Spiritual Healing to remind myself that I'm really not into it that much.  This era of Death isn't really my thing and does nothing to change my stance, although I will admit the fast section in "Jealousy" definitely reminds me of the Leprosy-era material.  Just a shame it's such a short segment of the song.

Morbid Angel - Covenant

While none of these Canadian versions are that significantly different from other presses, this one is immediately identifiable as Canadian since it has a bilingual explicit lyrics notice on the cover. I completely forgot about the re-recorded version of "Angel of Disease" on here, and it definitely stands out (positively) compared to the other songs on here. I favor the older material of course, but still solid stuff.

Dio - Holy Diver

Cost: $2.00

Wonderful to find a nice clean copy of Holy Diver. I originally bought the CD years ago for a regular used disc price, but the booklet and disc were pretty beat up, so I ended up trading away that copy when I got the 2005 reissue with the bonus audio interview.  Of course, now there are a couple of deluxe versions with extra stuff, but still a very nice find.

"Caught in the Middle" is ok once it gets going, but "Stand Up and Shout," "Rainbow in the Dark," and the title track are such absolute classics I feel they make the rest of the album a bit underwhelming.  Never particularly cared for "Invisible" or "Don't Talk to Strangers" at all.

Uccultum - Wheels of the Black Sun (2006)

Cost: $2.00

Very tasty guitar tone here that often reminds me a lot of old Cianide. Other than saying it's doom, I'm not quite sure what musical comparisons to make with this. While a few songs have it to a minor degree, it's largely free of the rocking vibe I'd associate with the more stonerish side of doom metal.  However, it's also pretty garagey and minimalist, so it doesn't sound all that much like any of the classic '80s doom metal bands or their descendants. My brain tells me I've heard a dead ringer for this vocalist in some other band, but I just can't place it at the moment. Solid clean timbre although there's a certain flatness that makes him feel like an uncharismatic Scott Reagers at times. 

While not a hidden gem of doom, this is competent enough and I can't see anyone who can appreciate stripped down Sabbathy stuff not finding this to be decent.  Nice find for the price.

Venom - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik 2CD (1999)

Cost: $2.00

Expect lots of upcoming classic metal posts, as I've been finding quite a high volume of it in the cheap bins lately.  I have most of it in some form already and there should be nothing I need to describe musically to any self-respecting metalhead, but it still feels great to find it.

I already have some older single-disc pressings of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik with the same tracklist, but curiously Deadline chose to needlessly split the tracks over two CDs even though there's no extra material.  The '85 gig is the Hell at Hammersmith show and has a few songs not on the video version and vice versa.  The '86 NY half is still a fine listen, but the song selection pales in comparison to the 1985 show.  The album did offer some live previews of upcoming material when it was originally released. The classic trio lineup plays "The Chanting of the Priests," and it's obvious their sound was beginning to shift a little even with Mantas still around, since it doesn't sound particularly different from the Calm Before the Storm album version without him. On the other hand, I do like "Buried Alive" seguing into "Love Amongst the Dead"--I think it's catchier than "Raise the Dead" and sounds a bit nastier and closer to the classic Venom sound than most post-Possessed material.  Of course the studio version (called "Dead Love") was eventually formally released on the In Memorium compilation later.  

Nothing bad I can say about this score except the minor inconvenience of having to swap discs out with this particular version.

Sam Kazerooni - Angry Planet (2003)

 Cost: $2.00

This was another instance where I grabbed a CD to reach the minimum purchase amount for a store sale without having to resort to buying a '90s R&B disc. I was happily surprised to find a listing for it on Metal Archives.  This is instrumental guitar stuff, certainly pleasant but didn't leave much of a lasting impression on me.  The majority of the 16 tracks are metal, but even the more mellow proggish tracks are enjoyable.  The album often feels closer to some sort of modern video game music than to '80s or '90s shred--it tends to be more song and mood based than riff and technique based, although I wouldn't have minded some more flash and pomposity to increase the memorability here.  Nice as a background listen but hardly anything essential.