(Below you will find DGR‘s review of the newest album by Deserted Fear, released late last week by Testimony Records.)
Germany’s Deserted Fear have been the engine that could over the course of six albums now. A compact project that has been a three-piece for a large course of their career, the band have been a consistent mark within the world of heavy metal.
Since 2012’s My Empire, Deserted Fear have proven themselves reliable, with releases hitting like clockwork on about the two-to-three-year mark. Their artistic evolution has seen the group change over the years from a very groove-inspired and influence-worshiping branch of death metal – the classic one-two thump of swede-death and Bolt Thrower‘s primal hammering filtered through the modern era’s taste for ruthless efficiency – to something akin to a current-day melodic death metal band since the days of 2019’s Drowned By Humanity.
While the logo or their taste for artwork has remained suitably corpse-obsessed, Deserted Fear have embraced a surgical attack that has made the three-piece sound so much larger than they actually are and one that has also made them fairly easy to understand and get into a groove of your own with.
While the melodeath genre has seen its fair share of revivalism across multiple eras and numerous “influenced by the influenced by the influenced by” crews, Deserted Fear have grown more naturally into a role that could just as easily have been built for late 90’s/early 00’s era In Flames and Soilwork. Deserted Fear‘s newest album Veins Of Fire puts a big spotlight on that fact and also shows that the band have comfortably settled in as being vanguards for doing so.
photos by Manuel Glatter
Deserted Fear haven’t been shy about revealing who their heroes are over the years nor the amount of fun they’re having in adding to the overall melodeath musical monolith either. Their previous album featured an In Flames cover on its deluxe editions and, like mentioned above, each album has trended closer to a modern melodeath sound. At first blush these days you’d be forgiven for assuming they’re from a different country entirely; an album like Veins Of Fire may be the closest the group have landed in that sphere yet – full of easily chomped-into guitar work, constant rumble on the rhythm front, and barked-out vocals that easily translate over, not only in a first few listens but also likely in a live setting.
There are releases out there wherein a practiced ear can easily dissect the songs perfectly constructed for a live-shows audience and Deserted Fear seem to have mastered the art. They’re not doing anything over-complicated but instead have found a gold mine of mid-tempo to thrashier guitar riffs that dominate within the songs, only to cede ground to any particular guitar lead layered over the top.
Songs like “Embrace The Void” and “Storm Of Resistance” especially are not just songs so heavily inspired by the melodeath scene – it seems like “Storm Of Resistance” in particular could be filed under the “every band has one of these they need to get out of their system” – but ones that are as if Deserted Fear were recognizing a void in the market and declaring “Well if no one else is going to do it, we’re going to”. Sensing an absence of catchy guitar lead over arena-worthy rock drums, Deserted Fear‘s fourth and fifth songs are tailor-made for that aforementioned live setting.
The sharp teeth and jagged edges required of any death metal band worth their salt haven’t been completely filed down within the bounds of Veins Of Fire. Much like 2022’s Doomsday, the aggression of Veins Of Fire is a little more even-keeled and spread throughout the thirty-nine minutes of the album. The “us against the world” salt mines proving forever bountiful, it would be almost criminal if the captains of the good ship Deserted Fear didn’t save some of their best tough-guy antics for songs like “Rise and Fight” and “We Are One”.
Built to specificity as the sort of anthemic fist-pumping-in-the-air style songs, “Rise And Fight” and “We Are One” may lay at different points within the overall run, but it’s hard not to imagine them sprouting from the same field of inspiration. It would be tempting to highbrow-act and dismiss a song like “Rise And Fight” with upturned nose, but the song ambles about made out of the most overtly earworm-oriented material Deserted Fear have done yet. Yes, that’s a basic two-step and near-punk-oriented guitar riff with the song oscillating between melodeath and metalcore on a quantum level, but damned if that dual-guitar lead interwoven throughout the song doesn’t make it one of the highlights of the album. Coming off of two songs of early-aughts melodeath attempts to grab at the throne, “Rise And Fight” may be the most obvious one yet. Deserted Fear even go for the step-up key change that we discussed at length during our review for The Halo Effect‘s March Of The Unheard and hell, if it works for Billy Ocean then it’ll work for Deserted Fear.
It’s hard to have too many knocks against an album like Veins Of Fire when Deserted Fear themselves seem content to dispense with the bullshit normally leading off an album. There’s no introductory scene-setter present this time around, and within a minute and eight seconds the group have already hit the first chorus of “Into The Burning Lands”. That song is wrapped around a core of heaving double-bass-pedal gallop for its chorus and is one of the longer songs on this release too – everything else is in a fairly compacted and efficient three-to-four minutes range. If it weren’t for the closing title song claiming the title at a heavyweight four-twenty-two, the four minutes and thirteen seconds of “Into The Burning Lands” would be the album’s real epic number.
If it isn’t clear that Deserted Fear spent much of the three years between their most recent two releases with these songs in the forge, the first hunk of the album is built out of songs that Deserted Fear have been demoing and released early on as well, with versions of “The Truth”, “Blind”, and the titular “Veins Of Fire” having come out early and eventually being packaged together a month or so ahead of the full release. The three leading off could almost misdirect people into thinking that Veins Of Fire is an album of mid-tempo stompers – “Blind” at song three is almost foot-through-the-floor level of bass drum stomp – and while all are solid songs on their own, given that Deserted Fear can mad-scientist a guitar melody into anything, it’s the previously mentioned mid-album run of quicker songs where it seems like Veins Of Fire fully hones into the sort of scalpel-sharpness an album of this type needs.
Like celebrating a seasonal equinox – even with the years gap in between – Deserted Fear releases are like a signal for summer concert season. Their last four albums have come out during the first quarter of the year with maybe a month or two difference between them. Part of this could also be that we seem to get around to covering the group in late April/early May every time, but that’s a personal failing. Nevertheless, they have carved out a niche for themselves of striking early on with the big metal anthems and the melodeath stompers, each release veering further and further up against the guard rails of their favored musical genre. They’ve traded a lot of that youthful “only death is real” attitude for something more straightforward, but in doing so have still managed to whip up another ten songs of fairly enjoyable – and yes, singalong worthy at times – material. Deserted Fear haven’t been a band to get avant-garde and shatter the walls of what we recognize as music; they’re in a more humble working-man’s sphere.
Veins Of Fire is fully recognizable and can be taken completely at face value; this is all stuff long-practiced within the world of heavy metal. How Deserted Fear manage to take that sort of music and still make it sound fresh is a different act of infernal sorcery, because while one can gleefully tear the disc down to its constituent parts, pieced together into its current form it still has enough hooks in it to ensure that Deserted Fear will have some mental space reserved for them throughout the year. They still sound as big as ever, even when it seems as if they’ve surgically built a release like Veins Of Fire for the sole purpose of landing, at bare minimum, three songs stuck in your brain until the end of the year.
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