Doom thrash is kind of an oxymoron. Well not kind of, it is an oxymoron; like someone making racist rap. For someone who has never heard Dream Death before this could be very confusing, but at the same time it is very intriguing. How the hell do you play doom thrash!? These gnarly bastards figured it out! They are from Pittsburgh, PA but honestly if you think about it they may have gone much much further if they had relocated to Florida. Seeing as this came out in 1987, these guys and Obituary would have gotten along all too well!! We can all dream right? Pun intended.
But alas! My first thought when someone first mentioned doom thrash was, how the hell are they going to be able to transition from thrash to doom? It's like they will start on the doom and then and then move to what, in thrash, would be a down tempo moshing riff, then into a mid tempo kind of thing. Think Obituary's Cause of Death; that should paint a pretty good picture. Don't think this is a clear rip off of Obituary though. It's easy to Dream Death to them but the riffs are very different. I notice Dream Death's riffage doesn't follow a stand key signature or a half whole tone pattern what so ever. They just break all kinds of rules! The power chords just move all over the place. A very difficult concept to describe.
Another thing this band would just be nothing without is the mastermind behind the drum kit! If there were any different beats behind those riffs, it's hard to picture them working together. Sometimes the guitar riffs don't exactly transition, it is literally the drummer and the vocalist letting you know when things are about to change. This doesn't happen all the time, but maybe instead of a transition, sometimes it is just a mini riff thing they do to help it flow smoothly. Like in the riff right before the chorus at 1:33 of the first song, "Back from the Dead". The vocals are a little cheesy on this album too. It really does fit the music oddly enough. You could call it one of those, "So cheesy it's good" cliches. His vocals sound a little more low pitched than Tom Araya's, and more of a growl death metal, but still thrash.
This is totally worth checking out. You don't need to be a fan of doom to get into this, that is the beautiful thing about it! This is honestly something to listen too if you have any kind of writers block and need to exercise your brain with something interesting. The only thing that keeps this from being in the 90s is that the songs do get repetitive. It doesn't kill the album by any means, (if it did I wouldn't review it) because going back to the, its so cheesy its good thing, the whole repetitive thing actually works for these guys! This is some very well written stuff!
86%
Favorite Tracks: Back from the Dead, Black Edifice, Dream Death
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