Where Evil Dwells

“…bending and breaking the rules that you feared…”

In the span of about a year and a half, long disintegrated Tombstone Records released six records – two from Wisconsin’s Viogression, one from Chicago’s Dementia, one from the UK's Tortoise Corpse, one from California's Silent Scream, and this ray of beige sunshine by Darklin Reach, also from the city of wind, each band struggling for a mention every other Leap Year while their efforts lie swept under the lumpy shag rug of Father Time, and I don’t have to tell you why it’s lumpy.

Yeah, ‘ol FT doesn’t care for this much, but it’s just as much the band as it is the style. By ’92, huge festering metallic flowers are blossoming like mushroom clouds across the scene, traveling at the speed of saw-toothed blackness, compressed by the harrowing gale force of death, or crushed in doomy rock slides. Oh yeah, and goddamn Seattle. Technical thrash, Bay Area or otherwise, is drowning in its own stagnating waters. Even the heavyweights of the ‘80s can’t land hard enough blows to knock the skinny kids off their feet anymore. But up and coming thrash bands are still lacing up.

Five-piece Darklin Reach (sounds more like a fancy street name than a band) endorse musical aspiration that’s sometimes developmentally dried out (or up), rather shoeless in its gait toward the sinister things they’re straining to get across, and only once in a while is there something to clench your fist around. Much of these ten tracks shoulder a power metal agenda in addition to whatever diluted thrash that’s found (or is it just what inexplicit thrash boils down to?) to sound like solidly impotent Iced Earth and Savatage with a few layers of goth thrown off. Probably better musicians than what leads us around here, guitarists Al De La Rosa and Al Pangelinan are at their best when fending off each other’s solos, meanwhile coarse crooner John Noerenberg inflects like Hetfield to bend a verse’s end, but is more a depressed Chuck Billy or even Russ Anderson laid up with the flu.

DR try to mix things up a bit for variety’s sake, of course unafraid to toss the kinda flimsy pseudo-power ballad (“Corner of Your Mind”) in with the pluckier fevers (“Impact and Elegance”) and fill other slots with affordable routine (“S.M.S. (Slow Motion Suicide)”, “Six Feet Under” and "Violence"). “Addiction” puts its head down and grumbles a bit, threatening, rolling along in a state of independence, probably the most enigmatic of the bunch with “Contaminated Preaching” and the title cut hurrying up the rear, the former swerving down thrashier lanes of aggression while the latter coolly resurrects traditional Omen-ish ancestors. “Dead Space” tries to be spooky, ‘effect’ual, droning in and about crystalline cymbals while sound bytes of the jovial dominatrix from the Dungeon Keeper PC game shatter any kind of otherworldly imagery they may have stumbled over.

Securely produced by Savatage veterans Jon Oliva and Steve Wacholz, the album shares Hell Awaits’ solo fiasco with one standing dead center in front of ya while the other is way over there, so out of earshot it’s hard to make out, otherwise knobbed confidently and precisely for that clinical effect.

A satisfactory effort, Where Evil Dwells is still alive out there, but doesn’t breath too well - lots of dust and debris where they’re at.