Sonic Beatdown

Album Review

Despite its title, a play on a track from their 2008 album Killing Season, Death Angel's Sonic German Beatdown features not one song from that disc; it was recorded at the Rock Hard Festival in 2007, so the set focuses very heavily on the group's first three albums (four tracks from The Ultra-Violence, two from Frolic in the Park, and four from Act III), tossing in four cuts from the then-newish The Art of Dying. The actual performances are generally strong; some songs seem slowed down in a concession to age (and "The Ultra-Violence," originally an almost-11-minute prog-thrash excursion, has been cut down to 4:35), but that only serves to blend them more seamlessly with the new ones, which in their studio versions had a heaviness and groove lacking in their speedy, technical '80s albums. Vocalist Mark Osegueda sounds more or less exactly like he did as a teenager, shrieking his throat raw as guitarists Ted Aguilar and Rob Cavestany, bassist Dennis Pepa, and drummer Andy Galeon tear it up behind him. It's worthy of note that, though Death Angel's undergone a lot of membership upheaval in the last year or so, this disc features almost the entire original lineup; only co-founding guitarist Gus Pepa, who never returned after the band split in 1991, is absent. As such, it's a powerful souvenir of a band that made its name in the '80s, only to come back in the 2000s a hell of a lot stronger than anybody had any right to expect.