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DEAD SAMARITAN
The Devil Tunes

Bury The Casket (2014)
Rating: 9/10

Great name for a band! Dead Samaritan is an exceptional death / thrash metal band from Finland and I’m slapping myself in the forehead continuously due to the fact I missed them first time round with their 2012 debut The Only Good Samaritan. So this time I’m making sure that I don’t miss the boat and have latched onto The Devil Tunes like a leech to skin and hungry for the contents.

If you’re a fan of old school thrash along the lines of Kreator or if more recently you were bowled over – like me – by South American thrashers Nervosa, then you’re going to love this fizzing, flaming, burning wreckage of an album that is made all the more venomous by the vocal rasps and sickening sneers of one Valendis Suomalainen.

This is a woman who sounds pissed off, so forget your watered down contemporary metal and climb on board this hurtling freight train because Dead Samaritan has just offered up another of 2014’s best records. The band also feature axe-wielders Marko Saarinen and Matti Viholainen, who in turn are aided by bassist Eero Virtanen and drummer Janne Honkanen.

What we get is 11 tracks which clock in at just over 35 minutes, but what a way to spend half-an-hour or so by banging your head violently in tune with those speeding rhythms and volatile vocal yaps. All of the tracks coughed up are relatively short and sweet, combining the raw aggression of mid-80s thrash with hints of traditional galloping, but all the while Valendis Suomalainen remains as possessed as she does you just know that tracks such as ‘Raise A Riot’, ‘Darkness Brings The Beast’, ‘Apex Beast’ and the like are going to be full of menace, all delivered with hair-raising speed and yet injected with some classy mid-tempo hooks for good, violent measure.

To say I absolutely adore this album is an understatement; Dead Samaritan prolifically churning out razor sharp, metallic mayhem that begins its spitting reign with the torturous clanking of ‘In For The Kill’, showcasing Virtanen’s festering bass which works in terrifying cohorts with Honkanen’s lacerating dream thuds. With its menacing conjuration of a chorus, this is a fiery dose of direct metal that has no time for subtlety.

Dead Samaritan serves up chunky riffage (‘Out With Your Feet First’), demonic dashing (‘In The Wake Of Burning Churches’) and doom-laden hammering (‘The Fire Of Contempt’). The end product is an album being a deadly cross of infectious old school metal with death metal tinges and a thrashier main course. The Devil Tunes pukes out hooks aplenty and sinister vocals that’ll have you quaking in your shit-stained boots.

Neil Arnold

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