REVIEW Metal Team UK March 08

When you read the most excellent "Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore", something grips you almost immediately. Namely, that while much of the development of the scene took place in Blighty during the late eighties, the giants of the genre have always been from either the United States or Scandinavia. It also struck me that being essentially an old fart, albeit one that is devastatingly handsome and of unparalleled metal knowledge, my tastes in death metal have always tended to be of the more old school variety, and that I have always preferred the Scando-death side of things rather than the Transatlantic way of doing things.

Nowadays, I find it hard to find any American death metal bands that go any way to float my boat other than the established old veterans that soldier on. Sure, I'll salivate over a new Obituary or Deicide release as much as the next balding, be-paunched 80's deathster, but the problem with the newer batch of "brutal" death metal acts from across the pond is that they couldn't write an actual fucking song if they were held hostage and threatened with death.

Thank God (or Satan, Thor or any deity of preference) then for bands like Deranged. The Swedish outfit have been going since the early nineties, and show no fear of evolving past what they do best: writing gloriously catchy, intense, brutal death metal that lives up to all the best traditions of the style. Now Pete, being a thoroughly good egg, told me when he sent me this CD that almost all of the song titles here reflect films by some obscure Italian film director (well not quite but obscure Italian Giallo movies Pete) . I, gentle reader, must be true to myself and to you and say I didn't know that at all, and so I won't elaborate on it any further, than to say this collection makes a fitting soundtrack to murder.

The production is absolutely perfect for this kind of metal, allowing the guitars to both bludgeon with the bass like a heavy implement brought to smash down on a fragile skull, while also allowing the lead guitar to scythe through the air like the whistling of a blade sent to slash a throat. The drums, rapid but scarcely at a blast beat show more primitive power and create much more of an impression than any poly-rhythmic bollocks and triggered studio magic that is paraded about in the modern extreme metal scene. The vocals, of course, are hoarse, grunted (yet still charmingly decipherable) tales of violence and hate. If powerful, tense and perfectly concise killer (sic) tracks like "Formula for a Murder" don't convince you that there's plenty of erm...life in old school death metal, then there is clearly something wrong with your ears. At nine tracks in a perfectly timed thirty five minutes, Deranged also know when to leave you wanting just a little more; something which many of their bloated more "modern" minded cousins might do well to emulate. Once upon a time, most death metal albums were made like this, but now it's the rarity rather than the rule, which is a great shame. Deranged might well be dinosaurs, but they're a fucking Tyrannosaurus to my ears. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a body to dismember to the strains of "Death Walks on High Heels".

http://iamderanged.com

Chris Davison