Defleshed "Royal Straight Flesh" CD
[Regain]
For whatever reason I've never heard this band before, but this is pretty damn good stuff. Total thrash metal with the snarling vocals of modern death/thrash: Good use of tempos (not too fast, not too slow), killer riffs that remind me of the golden age of thrash, a strong sense of energy to the writing, etc. It's not really that diverse, not that thrash has ever been all that diverse, but they keep the songs at around three minutes or less, so there's nothing boring here. The writing really reminds me of the first record by The Haunted actually, so I'm really pleasantly surprised by this disc. If I had one small complaint it would be that there aren't that many songs that feel truly memorable to me, but I definitely appreciate the vibe of this disc a lot. As for the recording, I love the distorted bass tone, they've got nice and crunchy guitars with a well honed distortion, the drums sound pretty damn good, and the vocals are nicely textured and not too far out in front. I think I'd like to hear the bass given some more punch as far as volume goes, and dropping the vocals back a smidge would give the guitars and bass more breathing room, but they've got a tight sound happening. I could go either way on the presentation. The color scheme is consistent and the imagery's not bad, I'm just not into some of the crammed together type treatments, and the fonts can be too busy over such detailed background images. The lyrics seem almost intentionally humorous to me, just dealing with violence and all that kind of stuff, not from a gore angle, just from a pissed off sort of stance, but the attitude definitely seems to be one of mild sarcasm to me. They're not really pulling that off so much, though. But fuck all of that, because the music rips, and you can't really understand what he's saying anyway. If their older work is as strong as this I've got some digging to do. Not bad at all. Thrash fans take note. (7/10)
Running time - 32:06, Tracks: 11
[Notable tracks: Royal Straight Flesh, Back for the Attack, Blood Brigade]
Regain Records - http://www.theendrecords.com

This review has been displayed 1870 times.