Review: DEAD END “Reborn From The Ancient Grave”

DEAD END “Reborn From The Ancient Grave”
Vic records

This band was found in 1988 in Zealand, in Netherlands and then died for many, many years – since 1993. But in 2014 Alwin Roes decided to give new life to cadaver. It took of course some time since he found right musicians, but finally he did it and work on new stuff could begin. In meantime THE END released compilation “Forever Is Not Eternal” on which we could find songs from demos and EP (all) + three ones in live versions and, as I think, one new composition: “Angelthing”.

DEAD END always played in melodic way. But in the same time it was always as brutal as Death Metal should be! We’ll don’t find here any broken riffs and stuff like that. Both Jeroen G. and Arjan play in melodic and very often roomy way instead. In general I can quite easily connect them (at least some of them) with Swedish classic band which once presented playing like that (earlier it was known as TREBLINKA and played this more brutal kind of Death Metal as well). Sometimes guitars even “cry” a little and we can feel some kind of nostalgia here. Anyway, it’s not what dominates in the music of DEAD END. And music is in middle tempos – sometimes there’re slowdowns, but even more often we have some speed-ups. They’re not brutal in meaning of CANNIBAL CORPSE. They’re rather livelier if you know what I mean.  Drums invite us definitely to mosh! But Harald do it in other way than in mentioned above, as an example, band. Bryan use mostly very interesting growling. It can be also somehow connected with for example “The Astral Sleep”… It’s not about the same way of singing, even if there’re some similarities. It’s more about common character.

Guys play in very interesting way. I mean, there’re a lot of changes what’s not about tempo which, as I said is mostly middle one. It’s about changeability of riffs and so on.  I hear that there’re a lot of ideas on minds of DEAD END’s members. So I can recommend it to everyone who like a lot (or more than a little) of melody in Death Metal. It’s also good lesson for these of you who think that this way of playing Death Metal was discovered by CHILDREN OF BODOM.

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