by If you haven’t yet heard Death Angel’s new album, The Evil Divide, released May 2016, you really need to! It’s a brilliant piece of thrash metal that should tickle any metalhead’s ears. Sadly, as the opening act for Anthrax and Slayer, Death Angel was only given 30 minutes to make an impression, and since the band has a cult following, they had to play a well-rounded set that included fan favorites and just one from the new album.
Photos by King Hazard.
That song was “The Moth,” and the band closed with it. The opener, however, was a tease of the timeless classic “The Ultra-Violence” from their 1987 debut full-length. That was enough, that brief moment, to cause the crowd to swarm to the front and get them primed for thrash frenzy of “Evil Priest,” also from the first album. From then on the crowd was a moshing circle pit of sweat and aggression.
From there we were treated to “Claws in So Deep” from 2010’s Relentless Retribution, “Thrown to the Wolves” from 2004’s The Art of Dying, and “Left for Dead” from 2013’s The Dream Calls for Blood.
Maybe because it was such a short set the energy in the crowd never subsided, and if you stretched your imagination just a bit, it might have felt like it was 1987 all over again. While the crowd’s enthusiasm held strong, so too did the impeccable sound, pure thrash riffage, killer solos, frantic pace from the kit, and steady bass.
Anthrax and Slayer couldn’t have asked for a better band to warm up the crowd.
Death Angel Setlist September 13, 2016:
1. The Ultra-Violence (intro)
2. Evil Priest
3. Claws in So Deep
4. Thrown to the Wolves – The Art of Dying
5. Left for Dead – The Dream Calls for Blood
6. The Moth
Rock Hard \m/
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