UMUR
"Raging Steel" is the 2nd full-length studio album by German thrash metal act Deathrow. The album was released in 1987 by Noise Records. Displeased Records re-issued "Raging Steel" on CD in 2008 featuring bonus tracks from the time when the band were know as Samhain.
The music on the album is thrash metal with a slight technical touch. The band are very well playing and especially some of the guitar solo work is excellent. The songs are well composed but not entirely without the sometimes awkward shifts in rythm and tempo that charachterizes much eighties thrash metal. The vocals are the low point of the album. Raw but not really aggressive or very convincing. There are a few shots at singing clean vocals on the album too, and that works pretty well.
The production is better than the production on the debut album and this actually counts for all features on "Raging Steel". The songwriting is better, the musicianship is better, and as mentioned above the production is also better than on the debut. So far so good.
Still listening to the album today, it does sound awfully dated and the hybrid thrash metal style ( German thrash metal/ US thrash metal) that Deathrow practices, while being more sophisticated than the more raw style of many of their contemporaries, isn´t always that rewarding. I´d call "Raging Steel" a pretty good German thrash metal album anyways though, and a 3 star rating is deserved. I´d recommend the album to fans of German thrash metal with a technical and at times melodic twist.