The Day Of The Beast
Self Titled
7.1
I will just come right out and say that I chose to review The Day of the Beast’s self titled debut because I thought the cover was cool: snarling demons emerging from a swirling miasma of smoke and fire bearing fangs and blades and bent on slaughter, it does not get much more metal than that. Happily for me, the quality of the music compares favorably with the quality of the cover art.
The Day of the Beast’s Myspace page accurately describes the band as “a dark and aggressive sounding thrash metal band with mild death and black metal undertones”. The band's blistering satanic thrash reminds me quite a bit of The Crown, but the raspy, black metal styled vocals and flair for melody also strongly recall Destroyer 666. While originality is obviously not their strong suit, The Day of the Beast perform some enjoyable thrash and mix in enough modern sounds to avoid sounding like an eighties throwback. The drumming, for instance, features plenty of double bass and even the occasional blast beat, and the guitarists spice up the staccato thrash riffs with some tremolo picked melodies. The pacing is predominantly brisk as befits a thrash album, but the band slows down for some mid-paced grooves as in the intro to “The Crawling Chaos” and the occasional melodic interlude, such as the serpentine lead lines in “He Who Shuns the Light”. The overall performance is tight and powerful; the band has the ability to lock in and drive the notes home giving the songs a sense of perpetual forward motion like a tank tread constantly churning up the ground.
The Day of the Beast’s main weakness stems from the fact that it is 2008 and they are playing thrash. Even the death and black metal elements the band adds to their sound cannot hide the fact that any one with a basic knowledge of metal has heard most these riffs before. The vocals are also a bit of a problem as the necessarily limited range of the black metal rasp and the fact that the singer uses a similar cadence on each track tends to make the songs run together.
Thrash bands are a dime a dozen these days, but I give credit to The Day of the Beast for trying to stand out from the pack by adding some more modern elements to their sound and there is no denying that they play with conviction. If there is a hole in your soul where The Crown used to live, The Day of the Beast just might fill it.
