“
With titles like Rattlesnake Chalice and Black Halo Rider, you know from the off who are Dead Child’s target audience: adolescent boys who spend far too long alone in their bedrooms searching for the Sword of Azeroth.
”“
With titles like Rattlesnake Chalice and Black Halo Rider, you know from the off who are Dead Child’s target audience: adolescent boys who spend far too long alone in their bedrooms searching for the Sword of Azeroth.
“
Dead Child – Attack
With titles like Rattlesnake Chalice and Black Halo Rider, you know from the off who are Dead Child’s target audience: adolescent boys who spend far too long alone in their bedrooms searching for the Sword of Azeroth.
Think Judas Priest, think Dio era Rainbow, or Mr Dickinson in his leather breeches and you won’t be far off the mark, but whereas they imbued their vocals with some measure of wit and self-deprecation, Dead Child’s singer Dahm manages to wail his way through an entire album without ever once sticking his tongue in his cheek.
Attack with its over-reliance on the stock pseudo-dark lyrics so beloved of the genre, and a tune that chugs relentlessly through the whole album with less finesse than a dancing elephant, is a lazy, one-dimensional take on metal, an apology of a pastiche, a hymn to mediocrity. There’s nothing much wrong with it, but only because there’s nothing much to it.
Featuring several former members of cult American rock band, Slint, Dead Child’s set out to create a more rock-orientated style of music than day jobs had hitherto allowed, taking inspiration from the metal bands of the 70s and 80s they’d all admired as boys growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. If that was their ambition, then they have undoubtedly succeeded. It’s just a shame that it was so obviously the limit of it as well.
Words: Cold Ethyl