Album Review

Dead Beyond Buried - The Dark EraDead Beyond Buried – The Dark Era

This was another nice free gift I received from Metal Hammer magazine, the 3rd studio release of British death metal band Dead Beyond Buried. These guys have apparently been kicking around since 2001 on the local London scene in spite of only releasing their first studio album in 2007, that’s an awfully long time to make any established fans wait for or even to remember your material; they followed it up in 2009 getting excellent reviews across the board from some quite prestigious publications. So that brings us to 2012 and not only have they given a physical copy away with Metal Hammer but they’ve put their full album up online as a free download for everyone to acquire which is admirable.

Not really big on death metal myself but I will appreciate those bands that excel in the genre like Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Behemoth, Decapitated the list goes on. So pulling apart this album into individual sections I’ll give credit to the musical aspect of the sound as it has its moments where it’s quite distinctive and interesting but there are also times where it just sounds to similar to other acts and becomes quite bland. There is only so much extreme double bass and blast beats I can handle which is why I normally stray away from this kind of thing because its just so full on all the time, “The Rupturing” doesn’t let up from start to finish which is impressive as it must kill the guy to play but it also hurts my face.

The vocal work I can’t really say much about as they just sound to me exactly the same as the vocals from the likes of Decapitated, I mean at least with Napalm Death his vocals are universally recognisable as unless someone had told me this was a new band I would have probably said about a million other acts before I guessed who they belonged to. On that same note though they do fit the material but I would definitely have tried to get a bit more variation on the record as to have more of a selling point. On the whole the album is well crafted and has its defining moments, but as a general death metal release it mostly sails into the middle of the pack really, not bad but not really going to make a huge impact on the scene.

3.5/5

Review By James Webb

 Band Members

Oliver Marchant
Michael Lee
Chris Brown
Simon Lee
John Biscomb
 Track Listing
1. Opening The Gates
2. The Rupturing
3. Spirit Of The Void
4. Cold Black Stars
5. Shadows Consuming Spirits
6. Utopia
7. Failures
8. Dripping Black Bile
9. The Dark Era
 Band Related Links
Dead Beyond Buried Facebook
 Review Score Code
- Top Cheese
- Brilliant
- Pretty damn good
- Ok I guess
- What Was That?