Sons of Death Valley
The Day of Reckoning

They will drag you kicking and screaming to the darkest corners of Death Valley, into their world in the midst of the 19th century. It kind of looks a bit cowboy stuff, kind of like in the old west if you look at the press release but the cover art squeals of something a bit more modern. It is a Danish band, a quintet, who are now releasing their first album which promises to be the day of reckoning in a thematic album about hardships and such things told from an outlaw in the old west.

It starts in a way that you almost come to expect an inbreed redneck jumping out with the banjo in his hand, so you kind of expect to see the average Texan speaking their totally devoid of intellect accent saying stupid things like guns are good and other ridiculous things. Then it takes on more of a harcore style with some southern country additions. Very aggressive sound and aggressive vocal, lots of power and attitude and fortunately the Texas references dissipate the deeper into the album you get. Have these kind of country/redneck influences is a tad different but the band still doesn’t sound particularly unique due to quite typical hardcore stuff and vocals.

The variation over a dozen tracks on this album isn’t particularly large and you tend to feel that the 45 minute playing time is a little on the long side. The good thing about this album is mainly the aggression of it, the production is rough yet very modern and I think it works pretty okay even though the songs as I stated tend to be quite similar. This is also the main problem of this album, the similitude or lack of variation making the album feel less dynamic than it could have felt had it been more varied. The vocals is a weak point to me as well, too monotonous.

Now it may seem as though I don’t like this album, but that is not entirely true as I think it is a fairly good album albeit it doesn’t really stand out that much. All the songs tend to blend together so I don’t quite find a favourite amongst the ones that are on the album, and that is probably the biggest weakness of this album – the lack of dynamic feel, it is just aggressive and heavy and the rest tend to vanish in a flurry of hardcore.

In the end I think that this is mainly an album for fans of the hardcore genre and the rest of us can safely overlook this album as it doesn’t really offer us any exciting new or fresh perspective on this kind of music, it is a decent album but nothing more than that.

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