Scream of Death

There was a point in my life, before I had a driver’s license and real friends, that I sought to sour out the most obscure metal bands and the knowledge about them. From the ripe age of about 15 until I was about 17, I scoured Metal Archives and Youtube looking for the best unearthed metal my teenage mind could find. How I never ran across Poland’s Dragon is beyond me, especially considering the style of Technical Death/Thrash that they played.

Now, here at the age of 25, I mostly checked into Dragon’s “Scream Of Death” based upon the review below. Putting this band and album into the upper class of technical metal with Death and Atheist is something to certainly turn my head. While those comparisons could be argued, I see that Dragon has much more in common with Russia’s Shah or Aspid, and more so with Aspid in the weird, off kilter thrash the band plays. The band really makes me think that if Shah hired on German vocalist Martin Missy of Protector to sing and hibernated listening to Watchtower.

What I really like about this album in comparison to quite a bit of Technical metal is how digestible it is. There aren’t too many long jams, and a lot of the songwriting isn’t lost for the sake of the technicality. And have I said that there are riffs? Because, ho-ho dear readers, there are indeed RIFFS.

The way this album was mastered/mixed has a lot of similarities with Atheist's “Piece of Time” and the aforementioned Shah’s forgotten masterpiece “Beware”. It has quite a bit of breathing room, where every instrument can be allowed its time in the listen, but with very discernible bass snapping along with the music. The one gripe I can register with it, while it does have the room to breathe, it does sound a bit “thin”, I feel like this should sound a bit “beefier”. While it doesn’t bother me too, too much, I just find myself wishing from time to time that this was a bit heavier.

I have yet to scratch my way into the rest of Dragon’s, surprisingly large (relatively speaking), discography it’s baffling that this band doesn’t seem to get a larger chunk of fanfare in circles of obscure metal freaks. The music here is of the upmost quality, and is well written, thought out metal. I figured I’d have to spend more time than I did tracking this down, but I just bought it from discogs for $8. Lets hope this steers you to check this band out too, like the review bellow did for me.