As the metal world waits to see if Metallica can deliver the goods with a new album - or if it's just Greatest Hits that will see them through to their old age - Death Angel show just how much the legends have lost their way in recent years.
Thrash metal's teen prodigies in the late 1980s, Death Angel reformed in 2001 and picked up exactly where they left off. Their comeback, 2004's 'The Art of Dying', showed they'd lost nothing in terms of intensity, and with Foo Fighters producer Nick Raskulinecz now at the controls, they sound colossal and powered by what's to come, not nostalgia.
If you need one of those 'In Case of Emergency...' aggressive and up-tempo records in your life, this is as good as anything else out there right now - brilliant drumming and riffing with the speed matched by catchiness.
The more you listen the more you wonder which you'll be listening to more in 12 months' time - this or James Hetfield's & Co's make or break.
Harry Guerin
