Offerings

Well, I figured out it was better to think of loose mini-series concepts, instead of coming up with lamer and lamer puns for the review titles. I'm doing this for you, after all. Now, let's have a look at some very old and/or forgotten bands who finally get the second chance they probably weren't hoping for, and to release their debut album decades after their inceptions. California's Betrayel, and I quote: 'hailed as being the only unsigned band to be featured in Kerrang! magazine', is the first entry on this brief list of mine.

Truth be told, I'm having a hard time picturing which is, exactly, the target audience of this kind of albums. I don't know how many middle-aged thrashers are following the scene anymore, nor how many of them remember about the very existence of Betrayel. You could judge them as a new entry in the scene, and they actually made it easier by avoiding any sort of 'return', 'rebirth', or 'resurrection' in the album title (Chemical Annihilation, I'm looking at you...), but that wouldn't be credible either, given that the band, nicely enough still made up of the same ol' line-up of the 80s, plausibly can't sound as fresh as a group of youngsters. So, I'm already not convinced by the very concept of this 2020 offering... well, Offerings, except for the possible explanation, of course, that they are just a bunch of dudes who wanted to have fun once again. Um, yeah, that could work.

Now, I've read somewhere that Offerings contains two unidentified songs that were allegedly written before the band's original dissolvement. I'd perhaps bet a nickel on 'The Edge' or 'Above and Beyond', or maybe 'Venomous', but don't quote me on that. Closer 'Helpless Souls' is also a re-recording of their relative 'hit' from their original run, making up a solid, catchy midpaced track that just oozes '80s metal. I would also mention the middle highlight 'My Demise', which has interesting verses with a clean guitar that somehow recalls Grip Inc., and the main melody apparently echoing Testament's 'Alone in the Dark' is probably the inconsequential 'Resurrected''s modest high point. Unfortunately, while every member does a decently commendable job, Chris Campise's voice must have deteriorated a good bit, in the meantime. His voice sounds like a three-way cross between Katon de Pena, Sean Killian and, for a name I never thought I'd utter again... Thrash or Die's Dr Fukk. His strident delivery is mostly insufferable all the way down to the album's nadir 'Meet Your Maker', even if some of the most countryside festival-esque refrains, like 'Face of Pain', would have been hardly better with another performer.

Arguably someone's day, somewhere, was lit up by the release of Offerings, if just the band members' ones, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're literally scraping the bottom of the thrash barrel.

-review written for the 10th Diamhea Memorial Review Challenge – may you rest in peace, Chris.