The Book of Heavy Metal was my least favorite trad power metal album once, but that was ten years ago. Now it’s nostalgic, because the genre has become unimaginably worse. Like reminiscing about a decade-old case of cancer on your skin now that you have it in your nutsack.
Dream Evil were/are a band combining several noxious trends. They’re a Band Named After A Famous Song Or Album. I won’t name names. Let’s just say that once you go past the Rollilng Stones and Judas Priest those drop off in quality. Second, they’re a Band Fronted By A Producer. Those tend to be glossy, polished turds where 90% of the effort was expended on getting the cardioid mic angled perfectly on the speaker cab and 10% writing songs. Third, they’re a Fake Supergroup. Dream Evil was founded in 1999 by Fredrik Nordström on rhythm guitar and Snowy Shaw on drums. Those are your stars. Rounding out the lineup is Peter “who?” Stålfors on bass, Niklas “seriously, who?” Isfeldt on vocals, and Gus “doesn’t count, Firewind wasn’t famous yet” G on lead guitar. They’re all good musicians, but if you have as many Swedish letters in your lineup as you do celebrities, you are probably not a supergroup.
Fourth, and most annoyingly, they’re a Funny Metal Band. You know what I mean. Songs about fighting dragons and drinking beer. They probably have stage costumes that are cute bunny rabbits or something. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Hopefully the four guys in the pit at warmup o’clock get a kick out of it. Everyone else is taking a piss and waiting for the real headliner to take the stage.
Their first album, DragonSlayer, was a solid bit of Hammerfall worship (the one-sentence verdict on Dream Evil is that they worship Hammerfall, but we persist). Their next album had its moments. Now we get to this one, which is a disaster.
When I played the first song, loud noises echoed through my condominion: my own uncontrollable laughter. What a terrible song. The principle riff is the most idiotic I’ve ever heard. The constipated “UHHH! UHHH!” backup vocals in the chorus are just asinine. It’s a quantum anomaly: a four minute song that seems to run for ten. Years ago I tried writing a review, gave up at “I want the Readers Digest version”, and that crap joke is funnier than anything on this disc.
Then we get a good song. “Into the Moonlight.” Actual power metal, with some cool hooks and vocal moments. The band comes together here. Dream Evil always had potential, they just needed to not self-sabotage.
“The Sledge” returns us to moronic gym bro chugging. The Boys(tm) don’t appear to know what a sledge is: it’s a land-based platform that slides across snow or ice on runners, often pulled by a team of dogs. Lines like “It hit me right between the eyes” are confusing: is this a tiny sledge pulled by ants? Maybe they’re thinking of a sledgehammer, but human eyes are about two inches apart, and the head on every sledgehammer I’ve seen is wider than that. Do the band members have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome? Does Sweden have small sledgehammers? I must resolve this mystery.
“No Way”: forgettable and forgotten, a mildly uptempo song that sounds like WASP at their worst (WASPnt, innit?). “Eeeeet’s only rock and roll!” Out of all the famous, distinctive metal vocalists you could have pastiched, you pick Ozzy Osbourne? By the way, if you were waiting for a fast song, this is it. You just heard it. Good decision from Nordström: everyone hates fast songs on power metal CDs.
“Crusader’s Anthem”. Two good songs one album? Sirs, you spoil us! It has Niklas Isfeldt’s best vocal performance, and some crazed blues-inspired soloing from Gus. Someday I want to cull all the good songs off every Dream Evil record: I think there would be enough to make a 12-14 track CD by now.
We’re now trudging through a wasteland of filler, and my interest is flagging. “Let’s Make Rock.” Let’s not. “Tired” does not stick in the memory at all. “Chosen Twice” is a callback to the big song off DragonSlayer, “The Chosen One”. Don’t worry, they changed it by removing the catchy parts. “They calleth us Anti-Christ”. Doth they verily? “M.O.M.” Whatever they’re trying here, nobody cares, least of all me. “The Mirror” is unreviewable, I just heard it and I can’t think of a thing to say. “Only for the Night” has a good main riff (for once in their careers) and a catchy chorus (likewise), but the rest of the song is just drab and unmemorable. That harmonized lead part just stinks of “quick, just give me something that sounds like Iron Maiden!” “The Unbreakable Chain”. Six minutes of this rubbish? “United we are strong / but weak on our own / No one can break this chain.” No, you’re thinking of bundles of sticks. A single chain link is the strongest chain possible. Each new link of a chain makes it weaker, because the chain now has to pull the load plus the weight of the additional chain links. This detour is pointless, like this album.
1986’s Darkness Descends was one of the most extreme metal albums of its age. I don’t mean the 80s. I mean the age of recorded music. Even in 2021 it’s a shock and affront, a pile of little limbs, a terrifying journey that no combination of programmed drums and Protooled guitar tracks can replicate. Darkness Descends is the Tsar Bomba of metal: decades old, technologically obsolete, but still (in some ways) unsurpassed. It’s less an album than a signpost: mankind went this far into hell and no further.
It’s a good example of pre-death metal (dying metal?). Although it’s still thrash – the vocals are barked but not growled, the guitars are just a semitone down, and the drums lack the intimate, in-the-room quality of early death metal – you can still see that by 1986 we were ready to leave thrash behind.
The riffs are a speed-picked blur, the sound of a guitar sawing through metal. The drumming is intense and technical. And although the seven tracks are still songs, they’re also less than songs. They barely hold together, and constantly seem on the verge of exploding like tempered glass. Dark Angel weren’t the first to point in that direction and they never played death metal themselves (their career ended on a different milestone, the tech-thrash Time Does Not Heal), but once you get here, Scream Bloody Gore, Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse become inevitable.
There’s also a surprising Metallica influence. “Black Prophecies” is the band’s attempt at a Master of Puppets style epic, and there’s Hetfieldian touches throughout – like how the title track has that descending-power-chord-over-choppy-riff trick straight out of “Disposable Heroes”. Jim Durkin was a big NWOBHM fan, and “Merciless Death” opens with a tribute to Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris.
Slayer is an even more immediate touchstone. Although Darkness Descends edges out Reign in Blood in quality and heaviness, Gene Hoglan would often mourn the fact that the label couldn’t get Darkness Descends out sooner than November 1986, by which time they were derided as “Slayer babies”.
Like Reign in Blood, Darkness Descends is very, very, very fast. The most excessive tracks are “Darkness Descends”, “The Burning of Sodom”, and “Perish in Flames” which are around 250 beats per minute. Unbelievably, these songs were actually performed faster live. Drummer Gene Hoglan was famous for slamming No-Doz before a show and just beating his kit into scrap metal. It’s a miracle he still has a heartbeat, and maybe he doesn’t.
Fast metal is boring, and these songs are Darkness Descend’s least exciting moments. The snare registers as a weightless popping sound. The guitars lose any semblance of musical notes and become an angle-grinder. Don Doty’s vocals are just a rapid-fire “jabba-jabba-jabba” like an TV informercial salesman rushing through all the terms and conditions. I don’t always skip these songs, but I don’t feel too bad when I do.
When the album slows down, it wrecks all in its path. “Black Prophecies” is among the greatest metal songs ever recorded. If it had any more atmosphere, it’d be the surface of Venus. Tom rolls detonate like thunder. Sections develop in a dark, nauseating churn, each seeming to collapse into the next, while riffs bite like the endless teeth in a shark’s mouth. It’s an incredible song that I appreciate more each time I hear it.
It’s a lesson in how to do much with little. When I play the song back in my head, I hear all things that aren’t there: tolling bells, marching armies, and nagging violin ostinatos. But actually, the “bells” are Rob Yahn plucking high notes on his bass, the “marching armies” are Gene Hoglan playing a sycopated snare rhythm, the “violins” are Durkin and Meyer picking notes close to the bridge. These guys take generic thrash ensemble and bring a whole orchestra to life, which is amazing.
The lyrics in general are interesting, catching Dark Angel at a transitional point. Their first album We Have Arrived tended towards the”we’re a thrash band and we’ll kill you all! BEER! PIZZA! PARTY!!!” school of lyricism. Exodus, while later albums read like an aberrant psychology journal. Here, the lyrics are dark and fantastical, suggesting a world of myth and shadow.
The man singing them proves a mixed bag. Don Doty’s goblin-like barks sound diabolic and menacing, but often he lapses into a kind of talky whisper that’s pushed a bit high in the mix. Part of the problem might be the extreme speed of the songs. Another might be the fact that all the lyrics were written by the band’s drummer – Doty often seems to be struggling to enunciate troublesome syllable clusters that just aren’t natural or easy to sing (“thecityisguilty! the crimeislife! thesentenceisdeath! DARKNESSDESCENDS!!!”) It’s not for no reason that singers usually write their own lyrics, although maybe that’s another way Dark Angel anticipated death metal. It doesn’t matter who writes the lyrics of the average death metal band – the vocals are so incomprehensible and distorted that it’s impossible to tell what they’re saying. For some modern bands I’m almost sure the lyrics sheet is written after the vocal tracks are laid down.
Darkness Descends is an unusual record, and not only for its brutality. Thrash metal is characterized by formal minimalism, with all sorts of disasters resulting from pretension or overdeveloped ideas (Metallica hits that point for some people.) But Dark Angel’s more elaborate moments are the album highlights, while their attempts at ripping your face off are often a little lacking.
St Anger is Metallica’s 8th studio album. It was released in 2003 through Elektra Records, and is famous for being very bad. Worse than previous Metallica albums. Worse than diarrhea. Worse than papercuts. Worse than getting banned from a chat room just when you’re ready to sling a mortally wounding insult. Worse than long trips in a car that’s making a rattling sound. Worse than when the pastor says “now, let’s go a bit deeper into Paul’s contextual usage of ‘divinity’…” at 11:59am on a Sunday morning. Worse than spiders. Worse than Vegemite. Worse than spiders coated in Vegemite. Worse than Vegemite coated in spiders. Worse than hard drive failures. Worse than finishing your Greek homework and realising you forgot the accents. Worse than merging two columns in a 10,000 line database, and the line count is off by one. Worse than people calling the internet “the interbutts”. Worse than puns that aren’t puns (ie, referring to Fox News as “Faux Noose”). Worse than remakes of movies that came out last year. Worse than an old friend wants to catch up and after half an hour of small-talk he says “have you heard of an exciting new business opportunity?” Worse than a friend who tells an unfunny joke and pauses for you to laugh. Worse than filling up your petrol tank from a diesel pump. Worse than knowing that you can’t go to a Halloween party dressed as Charlie Chaplin because everyone will assume you’re Hitler. Worse than holding the bag. Worse than hodling the bag. Worse than having your mother date your high school bully. Worse than having to close your Satanic pedophile ring underneath a pizzeria because people are getting wise. Worse than Googling a computer problem and discovering you’re the first person it’s ever happened to. Worse than realising you were born to play a sport that nobody enjoys. Worse than having a special interest that brings you into contact with nonces. Worse than spontaneously exploding. Worse than biting off half a sushi roll and the seaweed is all ragged and you know there are ragged parts stuck to your teeth. Worse than calling someone “cringe” and then discovering they run a charity for blind dyslexic orphans. Worse than learning enough 3D modeling to notice fake special effects in movies but not enough to be hireable to work on a movie. Worse than being in a Metallica cover band circa 2003. Worse than the 2005 film Elektra. Worse than the fact we’re now 1/4 through Biden’s first term and 80% of all political news stories are still about Trump. Worst than women who describe themselves as “MILFs” when they’re 21 years old. Worse than typing out a 800+ word rebuttal to something that was autogenerated by an AI. Worse than realising you’ve pronounced “hygge” incorrectly for 4 years. Worse than being a Pitchfork hipster and building a time machine and then using it to kill someone other than Hitler because it’s ironic. Worse than being a hand model and your new roommate is a compulsive battle-axe juggler and shuriken collector. Worse than starting something and not finishi
