DARK ANGEL — Darkness Descends (review)

DARK ANGEL — Darkness Descends album cover

Album · 1986 · Thrash Metal

5/5 · 2015-07-20
Vim Fuego

What do you know about Dark Angel?

The only thing many metal fans know of Dark Angel is their drummer Gene Hoglan has since pounded the skins for numerous other bands like Strapping Young Lad, Death and Testament. However, Dark Angel were once the only band in the world who could scare Slayer. Heavier, at times faster and more technical, and definitely darker than the Slaytanic ones, Dark Angel missed the bus to the relative big time by being too damn difficult for most thrash fans to handle. You see, there were none of the friendly riffs Metallica and their clones produced, no soaring or sing along vocals a la Anthrax or Helloween, and definitely no power ballads like ‘Fade to Black’ or ‘Armed and Dangerous’.

With ‘Darkness Descends’, listeners are assaulted with a maelstrom of riffs, machine gun drumming and straightforward shouts punctuated with piercing screams. On first listen, it's a jarring, caustic blur, almost too daunting to consider a second airing. It's almost impossible to keep up with vocalist Don Doty, even when following the lyric sheet. So many riffs fly past it's impossible to take them all in first time. The drum patterns are what we now come to expect from Gene Hoglan- surprisingly complex for the speed he played at. And the speed is utterly unrelenting. Each track seems to be faster than the one before. Speed was also the band's undoing. While there's no doubt they were tight, they were just too fast and too heavy for 1986 production values. A lot of the riffs get lost in the mix because of a sound that is nowhere near thick enough. It gives the finished product a slightly watered down feel. While Hoglan is now a hired gun of sorts, back in his Dark Angel days he proved himself an excellent songwriter, a rare thing for drummers especially in the 80s. He had a hand in the best tracks on the album, co-writing most tracks with guitarist Jim Durkin. Lyrically, he wrote what would have been 10 minute epics for normal bands, but clocked in at around four or five minutes at Dark Angel’s tempo. At a time when the average thrash fare was comic book Satanism or over exaggerated violence, Hoglan was penning more thoughtful works. ‘The Burning of Sodom’ is a reworking of the biblical tale of the fabled city destroyed because of depravity and perversion, which would scare the hell out of your Sunday school teacher. ‘Darkness Descends’ is an account of the end of the world, seeing nuclear holocaust as the biblical version of Armageddon. Just when you start to think the album is all bible stories, along comes ‘Hunger of the Undead’. It's a simple yarn. A soul dies, but then finds out there's no heaven or hell, because there is no God. ‘Black Prophecies’ takes an in-depth look at Nostradamus' predictions, and ‘Death Is Certain (Life Is Not)’ beat Metallica’s ‘One’ to the punch when it came to a mind trapped in an immobile, uncommunicative body. If you think ‘Reign in Blood’ is the final word in thrash metal, listen to this. While it is not as immediately likable, nor as precise, as ‘Reign in Blood’, ‘Darkness Descends’ is heavy, fast, dark, and about as extreme as thrash got in 1986.