Today's Pick: Dark Angel Darkness Descends
Musical genres, like people, have lifespans with reconizable stops along the way. They are born, a shadow of what they will become. In adolescence, promise is present, but not fully realized. They mature into the full flowering of adulthood, and then begin the long, slow slide into obliveon.
It is this last stage which concerns us here. When a genre is creatively spent, bands tend to follow one of four paths into the grave. The first is to abandon the genre entirely, usually to embrace some form of whatever came before it (Metallica). The second is to embrace aethetic novelty as if it were genuine innovation (Anthrax). The third is to adopt a middle road, a style that represents a mean between the various artists who have come before (Testament). The fourth is to do exactly what everyone else has already done, but to it in some superficially more "extreme" fashion. Which brings us to Darkness Descends.
By the time Dark Angel got around to recording their second album, thrash had largely blown its wad as creatively viable genre. Though a few bands with connections to the thrash scene were still forging a viable way forward (notably Slayer, Kreator and Sodom), these bands were really only peripherally thrash bands at this point (though all would eventually fall back into making stale, useless thrash records) and are better understood as being a part of the next wave of extreme metal. Dark Angel, on the other hand, lacked any real vision of its own (like most second tier acts), and instead crafted an album that is legendary among legions of thrash fans, but is laughed at by those who know better.
What Dark Angel developed was a sound that recapitulated everything that had gone before in the genre, only in its most extreme form. More speed, more riffs, more raw vocals. This was enough to satisfy those for whom thrash was little more than an excuse to drink beer and bang their heads, but as an attempt at innovation, it was an utter failure. Stripped of its superficially "extreme" trappings, Darkness Descends offers little more than a double time rehash of the least interesting riffs from the first two Metallica and Slayer records, spliced together to form cumbersome, badly edited songs that play at being "progressive" while actually being boring, verse/chorus tripe. What is sadly missing here, along with artistic vision, is any genuine sense of melody. Instead, what we get is pure rhythm in the classic populist mould, moronic headbanging drivel for those who really expect nothing of consequence from music.
Musical genres, like people, have lifespans with reconizable stops along the way. They are born, a shadow of what they will become. In adolescence, promise is present, but not fully realized. They mature into the full flowering of adulthood, and then begin the long, slow slide into obliveon.
It is this last stage which concerns us here. When a genre is creatively spent, bands tend to follow one of four paths into the grave. The first is to abandon the genre entirely, usually to embrace some form of whatever came before it (Metallica). The second is to embrace aethetic novelty as if it were genuine innovation (Anthrax). The third is to adopt a middle road, a style that represents a mean between the various artists who have come before (Testament). The fourth is to do exactly what everyone else has already done, but to it in some superficially more "extreme" fashion. Which brings us to Darkness Descends.
By the time Dark Angel got around to recording their second album, thrash had largely blown its wad as creatively viable genre. Though a few bands with connections to the thrash scene were still forging a viable way forward (notably Slayer, Kreator and Sodom), these bands were really only peripherally thrash bands at this point (though all would eventually fall back into making stale, useless thrash records) and are better understood as being a part of the next wave of extreme metal. Dark Angel, on the other hand, lacked any real vision of its own (like most second tier acts), and instead crafted an album that is legendary among legions of thrash fans, but is laughed at by those who know better.
What Dark Angel developed was a sound that recapitulated everything that had gone before in the genre, only in its most extreme form. More speed, more riffs, more raw vocals. This was enough to satisfy those for whom thrash was little more than an excuse to drink beer and bang their heads, but as an attempt at innovation, it was an utter failure. Stripped of its superficially "extreme" trappings, Darkness Descends offers little more than a double time rehash of the least interesting riffs from the first two Metallica and Slayer records, spliced together to form cumbersome, badly edited songs that play at being "progressive" while actually being boring, verse/chorus tripe. What is sadly missing here, along with artistic vision, is any genuine sense of melody. Instead, what we get is pure rhythm in the classic populist mould, moronic headbanging drivel for those who really expect nothing of consequence from music.
