Saturday 28 December 2013

Archives of the Dead part XIII: Beyond Fear - Dreaming of Pure Carnage (demo 1995)



Archives of the Dead part XIII: Beyond Fear - Dreaming of Pure Carnage (demo 1995)
Line up: Steve Smith (bass), Alex Betts (guitars), Jon Betts (vocals, guitar)
Recorded at Red Studio's on the 7th and 8th of May, 1995.
This is completely unknown British death metal band from Orpington in Kent. Beyond Fear has been formed around 1993 and was active only for three years. During this time they have released two demos: “The Taste of Red Impurity” in 1994 and “Dreaming of Pure Carnage” in 1995 and then the postmortem EP “Haunted by Visions of a Third Atrocity” in 1997. They’re one of those small bands, which I guess not many people know as they have never had a huge impact on the national scene, not to mention the worldwide underground, but the impact on their small local scene was I guess enough that someone managed to keep their old recordings and at some point offered them as digital download. And it is great that someone did, as this way I had a chance to listen to yet another really cool, unknown death metal band from the mid 90’s, whose music is better than I would expect and which really manage to catch my attention with some of these truly great songs.
I have been listening to “Dreaming of Pure Carnage” demo quite often recently and I must say that it is really good material. It contains five songs, but two of them are nice instrumental pieces played entirely on acoustic guitars, what gives a nice feeling of quietness among the brutal, fast and relentless death metal. So, except these two short pieces we’re left with three tracks of plain and classic death metal destruction. It must be pointed out that Beyond Fear was quite untypical in some way… I mean two of these songs are damn long, over nine or eight minutes long, so it can say a lot about how diverse these tracks are, with more untypical structures, etc. A lot of focus is on the riffing slaughter, like the opening theme for “Prayer Before Birth”, where the vocals appear not sooner than in the third minute and before that the band concentrates just on smashing with some utterly fast and aggressive death metal. It must be also pointed that unlike most other British death metal bands, Beyond Fear has no doomy parts at all and who knows if they actually weren’t the fastest British death metal band in that early to mid 90’s time, which I have heard? A lot of “Dreaming of Pure Carnage” is very fast and damn vicious and brutal, but it truly sounds great for me. Sometimes it reminds me such bands as Malevolent Creation, Vital Remains or Monstrosity, also Sinister, so you may know what it is like. Really good demo, indeed, I have definitely enjoyed it a lot, “Prayer Before Birth” especially. It is great that I don’t have this feeling like these songs (“Prayer…” and “Disemboweled”) very dragged for too long, not at all, because a lot is going on within each of them, with grinding fast parts, some slower stuff, even quite melodic themes here and there... “Torn From Within” is the only shorter song, with about three minutes on the clock and it probably is also the least interesting track from all. Anyway I think that the entire demo of Beyond Fear is just damn cool. Try to find it and enjoy some fast, diabolic death metal.
Final rate: 73/100

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