Author: Rok Klemše
Artist: Death Angel
Label: Nuclear Blast
Release: year_month
Length: 47:25
Rating: 4/5
Aaaah, Death Angel. After the split in the early nineties, which was basically the grim reaper for three quarters of all thrash metal bands, the Bay Area thrashers pulled off one of metal’s biggest »comeback« moves at the start of the last decade. At the now-legendary Thrash of the Titans event, which raised Exodus, Heathen and Forbidden (Evil) from the dead, the thrash energy came alive again and got the blood boiling for Death Angel too, who shook off their studio slumber three years later with the very solid record The Art of Dying.
Almost a decade has passed since the band got back together, which makes Death Angel’s second era already way longer than the first, during which the Americans of Filipino descent wrote themselves into immortality with the fantastic debut The Ultra-Violence, still one of the brightest moments of Bay Area thrash today. When their debut came out, Death Angel were barely hitting puberty (!), while today, despite their maturity, they’re at times even crazier and more wired. Living proof of the erupting energy of today’s Death Angel is probably the best »post reunion« record Relentless Retribution (2010), which finally crowned the band among the cream of thrash metal, and with the new studio beast The Dream Calls For Blood, Death Angel have vaulted exactly where they belong. Right to the very top!
Even though the thrash revival is practically dead, judging by what the new album delivers, Death Angel will fight to the last drop of blood, which the album title illustrates nicely. It’s actually the band’s motto, symbolizing sacrifice, gallons of sweat and blood, deprivation, and hundreds upon hundreds of tour miles that turned Death Angel into one of the best »live acts« around right now. If it’s not their best record, it’s certainly Death Angel’s most personal, and The Dream Calls For Blood is first and foremost an ANGRY record, maybe even the most aggressive of their career. The themes are just as angry, and the San Franciscans have turned them into a perfect musical beast that bites with killer-sharp riffs, breaks bones with grenade shelling, and tears flesh with furious, spat-out lyrics about egoism, broken relationships, hopelessness, the post-apocalypse and mental disorders.
Darkness, rawness and aggression are the album’s dominant theme musically too, and Left For Dead alone delivers an incredibly intense start. Knockout in round one! The band’s brutality is at times downright staggering. If Relentless Retribution hinted that Death Angel were a bomb right before it goes off, The Dream Calls For Blood is the moment just before the explosion, when all that pent-up energy seems to hang frozen in time for a second, and then in a fury of fire, destruction and chaos wipes out everything in front of it. The guitar riffs of the incredible Rob Cavestany play the role of shrapnel, demolishing everything standing in their way, and Rob is the brightest spot on this record. The album has some of the best guitar playing heard in recent memory! Cavestany’s riffing is flat-out murderous, we haven’t heard a performance this good in ages, as Rob opens up a whole new world of harmonic structures, meat-grinder fast-fingered runs, melodic interludes, wild string-shredding, astonishing »crunch«, psychotic riffs and solos that are simply »facemelting.« It’s a real miracle that the trio of Aguilar, Sisson and Carroll manage to keep up with the unbridled Cavestany at all, but damn, did they pull it off! While Aguilar holds the rhythm foundation firm and unerring under Rob’s escapades, Damien Sisson and Will Carroll are the real backbone of the band. The latter isn’t nicknamed Beastman for nothing, since his drumming is truly monstrous, and the man knows how to make drums interesting and varied, brilliantly bridging the space between the riffs. The bass is superb too, and Sisson’s performance is actually one of the best thrash bass showings in recent years.
Mark Osegueda’s vocal attack is similarly dynamic and varied. His voice is much more diverse this time than in the past, when he overdid it mostly with nonstop screaming that could get monotonous and boring in the long run. Well, there’s more than enough of his screaming on the new record too, and there could easily be less, but luckily Mark livens up the vocal lines with a wider range of different vocal styles. The bloodthirstiness of his screams is upgraded by an »Araya-style« shriek (the intro to Son of the Morning), high-pitched attacks, cruel, brutal outbursts and, to my great delight, once again beautiful clean vocals, close to Mark’s performance on the debut. Especially strong are the tracks Execution/Don’t Save Me, Caster of Shame and the closing highlight Territorial Instinct/Bloodlust, where the cleanly sung vocal lines reign supreme.
Death Angel played it safe this time – on The Dream Calls For Blood they worked with the same producer (Jason Suecof) and even the same cover artist as on Relentless Retribution, but hey, why change something that works so well!? At first spin the new album may indeed feel a bit repetitive (nonstop assaults of fast riffs, a crushing rhythm section and beastly vocals), but repeated listens reveal plenty of strengths in this record, and there are a lot of them. Even though it doesn’t worm its way into your ears as fast as Relentless Retribution, mainly because of the obvious dialing back of melody, the album has numerous layers, and digging into them is richly rewarded. Death Angel aren’t reinventing themselves on the new record, much less reinventing thrash, but let the radio play Nickelback for me until the end of the year if The Dream Calls For Blood isn’t one of the strongest contenders for album of the year and one of the best thrash records in recent years.
Death Angel will present The Dream Calls For Blood in Ljubljana too, on December 1, 2013 at Channel Zero!
Lineup
Rob Cavestany – guitar, vocals
Mark Osegueda – vocals
Ted Aguilar – guitar
Damien Sisson – bass
Will Carroll – drums
Production
Jason Suecof
Tracklist
1. Left For Dead
2. Son of the Morning
3. Fallen
4. The Dream Calls For Blood
5. Succubus
6. Execution – Don’t Save Me
7. Caster of Shame
8. Detonate
9. Empty
10. Territorial Instinct/Bloodlust
