OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Disfigured Dead – Visions Of Death

New York-based death metal quartet Disfigured Dead’s debut full-length album, Visions Of Death (released through German label Hell’s Headbangers), is a massively entertaining throwback to the days of late 80s thrash metal and early 90s death metal, combining the low-end thunder and sinister vibes of Autopsy’s classic ‘Mental Funeral’ with the furious, thrash-inflected riffage and breakneck pace of Death’s ‘Scream Bloody Gore’ – almost a perfect antithesis to the overly technical, clinically sterile, ProTooled death metal of the contemporary age, where triggered kits, mechanically tight performances and over-production rule the day. No, Disfigured Dead instead deal in a raw-as-freshly-killed-meat variant of the death metal genre, with relatively Dave Gruver’s simplistic yet brutally catchy riffage played over a rhythm section itself performed at the ragged edge of musical coherence, all topped off with Evy ‘Festerface’ Thompson’s sneering, throaty roar.

The organic, warm production helps sell the detuned, horror-fuelled riffage – just witness the discordant, unsettling opening to ‘Entombed Undead’, all out-of-key chords designed to set the teeth on edge followed rapidly by frantic palm-muted tremolo picking and hammer-on-pull-off accoutrements, or the ominous rumble of Ryan Katzer’s four-note bass intro that kicks off album opener ‘Beyond The Darkness’, before Kyle Kratzer’s hell-for-leather drumming sets an invigoratingly lightspeed pace to the track. Another element that really helps draw the listener in to what Disfigured Dead are about is the vague sense that the band has its tongue firmly planted in its collective cheek – there’s a sense of a band actually having fun that bleeds through the tunes on this album and makes them all the more endearing.

Sure, it’s not the most original offering out there – hell, Disfigured Dead are competing fairly directly with pretty much the entirety of the roster of Razorback Records in terms of putting out death metal with an unashamedly old-school vibe. And it’s true that the band’s style of riffage can get somewhat repetetive as the album goes on – the songs, while entertaining, do seem to alternate quite regularly between lightning-fast thrashy riffage and mid tempo chug sections – but for all that, it’s the vibe of a band revelling in playing some dirty, detuned, old-school death metal that really comes through and gives this album its charm, and makes it a worthy recommendation for fans of the early 90s, Floridian death metal brigade.

Disfigured Dead’s MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/disfigureddeaddeathmetal
Hell’s Headbanger’s Website: http://www.hellsheadbangers.com/

Bottom Line

While hardly original, this album is a genuinely entertaining release that recalls death metal's sleazy, simplistic salad days, and as such comes recommended to any old-school DM fan.