Dragon-Fallen Angel

Metal Mind
1990/2008 Re-issue



Poland's Dragon had a history that dated back to 1984 and even though they got some praise early on they ran into some tough times with members having to serve in the military and members fleeing the country. Yet eventually times would became a little more stable for them and they would get to concentrate on their music. Before death metal was really an established genre or sub-genre some bands came from thrash and started adding elements that would later become traits of death metal. Dragon fall in that category as they obviously loved thrash as you can hear some Slayer, Kreator and early Sepultura in their music. Yet they were trying to push beyond the typical thrash style as they approached their sophomore effort "Fallen Angel". The music contains a variety of heavy, wormlike crawls, rapid fire blast of blurring speed and the typical thrashing sounds as well. Despites the inclusion of a moderately divers range of sounds, I am not sure that their writing skills could handle it all. The arrangements very from competent to amateur and rather messy as I think they knew they wanted different sounds, but they didn't how to piece them togethe to compliment one another. At times it's heavy and they shake things up with the pace changes and other times it sounds like they needed to spend more time thinking their ideas through. The vocals were not of the thrash variety as vocalist Adrian "Fred" Friedrich attempts a rather loose, semi-growl talking style that didn't really work for me. The heaviness of their music is there in spots and they hit on different sounds and approaches, but really it's just a little sloppy and fairly easy to understand why they never got that far.