Are you ready to metal?!
I am so friggin excited to share with you all this week, one of my favorite albums of all time:
Death - The Sound of Perseverance (1998) is our week 5 selection!
I remember reading a thread on Reddit about metal bands that would be good for a Gizz fan. There were plenty that obviously come to mind (Motörhead, Tool etc), but buried in the comments someone mentioned Death and immediately it just clicked. Of course Death, a death/thrash/speed metal band from Florida, would be amazing for headbanger Gizz fans.
This is the final studio album from the band, as Chuck (lead singer and guitarist and only constant member of the band) would sadly die of brain cancer in 2001. Chuck was always highly technical and massively talented, and this album sounds soooo clean to me. His vocals are understandable, unique and at times almost operatic.
The drumming is on point thanks to Richard Christy. Does that name sound familiar? If so, you probably watched/listened to Howard Stern in the mid-late aughts, he was the guy on the show with the massive porn collection.
Death rarely put a bad song on an album (I might be biased because I know all these tracks like the back of my hand) and the subject matter of the lyrics are mostly dark but often fantasy based, kinda reminds me a bit of Gizz. Also like Gizz, IRL he was apparently a very nice and positive dude despite these darker tendencies. The musicianship of the album is just prime, lots of tempo changes (I think I’m not really good at detecting those but something is changing a lot lol, lots of twists and turns) and it ends with a really sick Judas Priest cover.
This album really changed my perspective on what metal could be…while of course absolutely as brutal as you’d expect from a band called Death, this is a beautiful album.
Hope that you enjoy this one, it’s in my forever rotation no doubt.
Note - DSPs don’t have the regular version, which stops at Painkiller. The rest is like extra/deluxe stuff that I haven’t really listened to. Only disc 1 is the original release.