THE DEAD: The Dead

Produced by The Dead

Released: 2007

The Dead is the continuation of a Queensland heritage, containing as it does guitarist Scott Edgar from the now-defunct Misery, one of the greatest Aussie death metal bands of all. It would be easy to suggest from a cursory listen that his new band is merely a resurrection of his old one, but this would be a mistake. That there are similarities cannot be denied but there are some idiosyncracies evident on this album that delineate these bands and it has to be said that The Dead come off as somewhat inferior.

Edgar and vocalist Michael Yee have been doing this sort of thing longer than almost anyone and there's no doubt they know what this is all about, and The Dead churns out enough solid, meat-and-potatoes death metal to keep any fan more than satisfied. The production tends to be a little demo-ish at times (rather like the artwork), but fits rather well with the band's unadorned style. The bass is surprisingly audible (perhaps because the bassist mixed this) but strangely toppy and thin while Edgar's guitar retains the huge sludgy sound he used in Misery and the drumming is mostly blastbeats. In the end however, The Dead falls a bit short. Apart from the last song, the earth-shaking and doom-laden "The Doomsayer" that more than any other track here evokes the shadow of Misery, there isn't really much in the way of a real stand-out and the material suffers a little from the rather cliched lyrical matter and cheesy titles like "Onslaughter" and "Raging Violence"; no matter how many times I see it, "They Eat Their Wounded" just strikes me as a silly thing to call a song and it makes me laugh out loud everytime. Lyrically The Dead doesn't really rise above the usual tales of serial killings, murder sprees and demonic invasions of so many other bands and at times they don't seem that well thought out: "a killing kind of war" suggest there's some other kind and "The dead are alive/Crucifixions burning inside them" appears to make no sense. The Dead is also very short: with nine songs it still only clocks in at just on half an hour, which is shorter than a Misery album and that's saying something.

The Dead is a competent album of unrelenting death metal, the kind you would expect from a couple of scene veterans, but there isn't that much to it and doesn't stand out at all from any of the hundreds of others like it.

1. Hunting Humans
2. Onslaughter
3. Raging Violence
4. Nameless Entity
5. The Dead
6. Drown in Sin
7. They Eat Their Wounded
8. A Killing Kind
9. The Doomsayer

Rating: 55%