The end of hope and dreams, fearless undead machines!

Deceased- Fearless Undead Machines (1997)

Abandoning the Best of the 2000s series of posts for a brief moment, here's a ripping album from way back in the 90s. The main reason I'm posting this, aside from it being a truly great death/thrash album, is my last post got me thinking about concept albums in metal. They seem to get such a bad press, constantly linked with notions of pomposity, self-indulgence and musical wankery, but that's rather unfair. Equally, concept albums =/= Prog, though progressive music does seem to lend itself very well to story telling and picture painting. Deceased's 'Fearless Undead Machines' album is based upon the Living Dead Trilogy specifically and zombie movies as a whole. It contains a few samples from the original Living Dead movie, most notably right at the start of the first track.
Though the band flirt with both Death and Thrash metal, it is predominantly the latter that we find here and the riffing is superb. In places it is reminiscant of Iron Maiden, if they were to play balls-to-the-wall thrash. There's more to this album than 'simply' break yer kneck riffage, however, there's melody, piano interludes (that surprisingly work) which all adds to the eerie, 60s B-movie horror effect of the album. It's a good deal that there's variety on the album as, clocking in at over an hour, it's quite a beast to be taken in at one sitting and the changes of pace and the odd shorter track help to break up hat might otherwise have become a bit of a monotony. This isn't to say that the music is ever in danger of becoming stale, but simply that a full hour of similar, albeit rather awesome, thrash metal might just start getting a bit dry.

I'm all too aware that I've started waffling more and more with my posts so I'll try to keep this one a little shorter. Last word on this album: If you like it then by the love of God, the Devil or Science (who am I to judge?) check out their other work, there isn't a crappy Deceased album, particularly Supernatural Addiction which I was originally going to include in the Best of the 2000s but decided upon the Concept album link.

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"When there is no more room in hell... the dead will walk the earth."