Dead Label
Sense of Slaughter

An Irish hardcore band? Well now I've heard everything! The green isle in the Atlantic Ocean is famous for producing whiskey, beer and a yearly book in which they write about impressing and strange things that people do. It's also the place where they built the unsinkable ship called Titanic. Otherwise though, Ireland is probably most famous for their green fields with sheeps and four leaf clovers and strange, beardy leprechauns that takes you to gold kettles. Music wise it's not poor, though I can only remember three big footprints theyve made except for their rich folk music, which are U2, thin Lizzy and Gary Moore (RIP) and then of course the odd boy band, but they've hardly made "big" footprints. With their full length debut, though, the hardcore act Dead Label is trying to put a new label on Irish music.

'Sense Of Slaughter' roughly feels like a cross breed between melodic death metal and hardcore, where the vocals are clearly more related to the hardcore scene and the music feels pretty much like the other way around. I would describe the drums as an army of marching soldiers, going in complete symbioses on the hard paved streets of Berlin with their heavy black boots. And it's not just the marching soldiers that holds a united beat, but also the string section plays co:operated throughout the album and feels more united than combined twins. Their melodies are almost going round round like a record with some sidesteps every now and then. On top of all this we find the shouty vocals of Dan O'Grady and the best way to describe his vocals I think would be to have you locked in to a room where you're forced to hear Justin Biebers collected works all day long… the way O'Grady screams his way through this album is how I imagine I would scream after a thing like that.

'Sense Of Slaughter' doesn't feel like a kind album anywhere and besides the almost two minute long intro I'd say it's a 44 minutes long album of endless screaming. But don't get me wrong, the songs aren't bad and their melodies are constantly moving forward and taking the album onwards with music that feels pretty good. At least for let's say half an hour… The problem is that none of the songs really feels different compared to the others and they all tend to just melt together in to one big paste where it's impossible to tell one song from the other. Individually, all songs are pretty good, but together it's easy to spot the problem - they can't variegate their music enough… and they don't have the ability to kill their darlings well enough when they lack this ability which results in the album feeling too long. Here we have 45 1/2 minutes of more or less the same song, and in my world that always tend to get a bit repetitive.

It's hard to imagine that Dead Label comes from the same country that has given us Enya and The Coors, since they sound about 100% American and about 99% Swedish, but that's the story. Looking at the titles you definitely get the impression that they've gone for an album that's so fucking evil you can't escape it, but all of it just feels like about 150% too long. Had they've cut this album to half an hour I'd definitely liked it better because the problem with the album isn't the quality - it's the quantity of songs sounding alike.

Dead Label have good potential and hopefully they've written three different kinds of songs for the next album, because then it'll be three times the treat. That is if they don't make three times as many songs seeing how they've got three times the templates of song platforms. But you want to know something really strange about the fact that eleven of these twelve songs sounds so similar? I don't feel completely fed up with it after playing through the album. And for that the band deserves a small piece of credit. But looking at the long runs it's not a working way of doing things. Playing it a few songs at a time and the album works very well, playing it all together and it doesn't, but they have some good ideas going on.

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