Ascended Dead - Ascended Dead

ASCENDED DEAD - Ascended Dead (Self released demo MC 2012)

I don’t know about you, but personally I love to chase new bands within my favourite metal subgenres – black, death, whatever metal – it is always damn cool to get something new, fresh and killer… and it doesn’t even have to be original or perfectly recorded, as long as there’s the feeling and great, memorable riffs and atmosphere. Here is such demo, which from the very first listen caught my attention and well, it actually became one of my favourite demo releases of the recent months. The band is called Ascended Dead and hails from San Diego, California and features four, it seems, very young Americans who decided to fuel their hatred with some old school death metal sounds. And man, they do fuckin shred! I mean, when I listen to this debut demo cassette it feels like I got a demo from the early 90’s, from some legendary acts, as the vibe, the feeling and the quality of Ascended Dead demo is very similar. I am very impressed, especially if you think that those guys weren’t even born yet, when “Left Hand Path” was released! Ha!

Although the band is American, their music is more European sounding rather than American. Of corpse I can hear also many influences from the early Death, Sadistic Intent and even the demo era Morbid Angel and Slayer’s “Show No Mercy”, but more there can be found the traces of the likes of Treblinka, Nihilist, demo era Dismember, early Merciless and also early Asphyx. So, quite impressive list of bands, don’t you think? The band definitely sounds old and archaic, but I must say that I really like the production of this demo. It is quite raw, but everything is well audible and in many ways it reminds me the recordings of bands like Repugnant, Degial and Invidious. Or maybe also Tribulation, especially if the Swedes has a demo titled “The Ascending Dead”? Well, definitely there’s similar atmosphere in the music of Ascended Dead and each of their fours tracks is truly great and if you like the old and new bands, which I just mentioned, then get this demo right now! There may still be something to improve on the next recording – like I’m not really impressed by the guitar leads, but from the other hand this sort of music doesn’t really require perfect technical skills and 100% top notch production. It can even sound chaotic at few fragments, but who cares as it is a demo, and Ascended Dead did good job here. My favourite track would probably be “Caustic Decay” – it is really violent and one of the main riffs reminds me Cadaver’s “Decomposed Metal Skin” hehe.

Final rate: 80/100