Snake Eyes - No One Left to Die

SNAKE EYES - No One Left to Die (DEFENSE - CD 2022)

It's been few years since “Macabre Tales” EP from Snake Eyes was released (2012 to be more precise) and honestly, I don’t even remember much from that CD, I haven’t listened to it since I got it. I also have no idea what took them so long to get another recording finished, but let's just be happy that "No One Left to Die" is out. Better late than never, especially when we get a nice and solid dose of thrash metal. Which is exactly what Snake Eyes served us. 

And there’s only one thing, which I would really do differently – this album is just too long for me. 50 minutes feels like a bit of overdose of thrash for my musical taste, especially in this form and style. On the other hand, Snake Eyes does everything to get things right and tries to diverse their thrash metal as much as possible. So, you will find here plenty of straight forward, faster, aggressive thrashing songs, as well as a bit slower pieces, to get a nice diversity within this genre of metal music. Stylistically, I think this is a good mixture of US and European thrash metal, both old and new. There has to be Slayer - Slayer is in every thrash metal band, it's just mandatory. But you will hear also a bit of Testament, Kreator or Protector in it too, so all the thrash metal I like to hear, not that wimpy stuff. My sensitive ear can also catch a bit of melodic death metal here and there, almost the Arch Enemy style - “Fear of Gehenna” for that matter - which is something I am not big fan of, but I have no problems with, if it comes in smaller dose.  

Generally, Snake Eyes delivers solid, quality thrash from start to finish. They did have enough cool ideas and great riffs to fill this album up, so I’ve listened to it with pleasure. Except of “Sigh of Death” probably, which is the closing instrumental song, extending this album for another ten minutes – without it the album would sound better, I guess, but I can easily use the skip button and just play the whole thing all over again. I am sure some listeners will enjoy that instrumental piece more than I did, but I am not gonna argue about it. And one more thing, only after I have finished listening to “No One Left to Die” I realized that Snake Eys got themselves a female vocalist. But for fuck sake, I would never guess. Take that as a compliment or not, but I think it’s quite cool to realize that. 

Verdict: 75/100