These Florida natives have found a rather dumbfounding way of enlightening their listeners to the peculiarly absurd, specifically that which is found in the darkest recesses of underground music from any veiled corner of its vast spectrum. Many bands emerge with great artistic wizardry, crafting an experimental opus so earth-shattering that it defies every expectation. Other bands spend countless hours draining themselves of every conceivable fuel, be it personal or financial, in the process of creating something that could eventually come to be as legendary as the Norse gods. Others use their limited budgets and skills to settle with what they feel is satisfactory, yet still stand high with promise and humility. However, Dead Dark Slide is a band who unfortunately do not even rise to that caliber with Feel the Heat. To put things rather bluntly, they have taken a different path of their own, something that is very much the opposite into the realms of what appears to be parody.
Upon making an attempt to write this review, it was difficult to find the appropriate release material (band biography, release notes, etc.) outside of their own self-gloating penciled hubris. The band have no previous releases outside of those in the Amazon digital store, and even more recent reviews were all but impossible to find; the vast matrix that is the internet simply didn’t hold any yield to my wanderings. I would later come to find out why. There is little on Feel the Heat to find love for or jettison laudable worship from ones ever-stretched vacated mouth for. I may be jaded at this point, and demand more from new artists fighting for their share of listeners; I may demand better musicianship, and some seriousness for your art. I may even be too negative, but who could blame me after I sat down to watch Dead Dark Slide’s home-made music video for the song “Your Blood Runs Red”, which would make the likes of the countless YouTube-based black metal parody acts like Gorgorotten laugh in utter disgust.
DDS (as they shall henceforth be referred to) are a hybrid of aggro-industrial and gothic rock that accentuate their sound with vague elements of death metal. To be fair, and in their own words, the sound is somewhat similar to Eyehategod and a hint of old-school Ministry, or of my own addition, elements of The Cure and Virgin Prunes. However, to even mention those three phenomenal iconic monoliths of gothic rock and aggro-industrial in comparison to these Florida natives is downright insulting. DDS manages to craft their work in a mediocre, half-baked attempt with Feel the Heat. Though they do show some potential in basic knowledge of song composition and musicianship, the album quickly falls apart once the light goes off and the “monsters” come out to play. Surely, even with those traits prevalent, when every song arbitrarily follows verse/chorus/verse patterns and poor execution of both riffing prowess and vocal performances, the tedious nature of Feel the Heat peeks its venomous head from a pile of asps and wisps into the listener’s direction, ready to inject its poison; except, that poison may as well be laughing serum.
In addition to this lack of originality, the album is simply incredibly boring and produced haphazardly. The guitar tonality is super thin and is more akin to a bottom-of-the-barrel, dime-store-varietyDarkthrone clone, and every song seems to end so abruptly that it feels like I’m listening to the last few seconds of each song on Immortal‘s Battles in the North. For all of those by now familiar with that release, every song seems to end out of nowhere without any hint of a cool down, fading, or climatic hard-hitting finale. The vocal style ranges from guttural death growls, “tough-guy” metalcore shouts, and a typical gothic-style monotony. The clean vocal melodies are still terrible enough, though, to make vocalists like Guggi or Gavin Fridays from Virgin Prunes appear to be classically trained opera singers. The only thing that I can honestly say that stands out on Feel the Heat are the synths that pepper each track, sometimes being a bit more ominous with the use of tri-tone choir progressions. I don’t have much to add in regards to the lyrical department, they are just as equally uninspired and juvenile in the end.
To give Feel the Heat some credit, it defiantly has a strange avant-garde persona that lurks underneath, and to even mention such a thing is a stretch of the imagination. Certain songs erect themselves upon a more metallic throne, having a quasi-fusion of their major influence, Eyehategod, and more of an “epic” leaning towards the likes of A Vision Bleak. Other tracks upon the slab of questionable quality border something that resembles early 80s post-punk and electro-pop. A great deal of industrial synth swaths and monotone melodic singing, as well as the rare moment of robotic auto-tune that are reminiscent of tracks from darkwave favorite :Wumpscut:, or even Daft Punk, spice up an album that would otherwise stand short of being just passable. These lingering elements of Feel the Heat show that DDS’ frontman, Ryan Michalski, has more grasp on doing electro pop than anything that revolves around metal. What really brings everything back to the questionability of this entire fiasco is sub-par execution, poor production, childishly shallow lyrical content, and the fact that nothing on this album melds into an even moderately thought-out, cohesive singularity. One song is doom-laden hardcore, another is straight-forward death metal; other, still, are super sappy goth ballads. If Michalski actually fused them all into one well though-out cohesive track throughout, just maybe, this album would be something passable.
I am a person that is hard to please, especially when hubris shows higher than your musical talent. On the other hand, I still can not shake the feeling that this whole thing is parody to the point of absurdity. It was much too painful to get through the album without being possessed by that familiar very awkward dirty feeling. I’m not sure if it was due to the poorly fabricated, uninspired goth-pop approach, or the boring and contrived attempts at death metal. Perhaps it’s the tough-guy, immature and sappy lyrics. Dead Dark Slide’s Feel the Heat just ferments a stench of half-assed shenanigans. The only song on it that was actually good out of the ten was “Fuck Haet”, and even then, the lyrics really just destroyed its potential.
In the end, Feel the Heat is a juvenile attempt at cloning the likes of old school Ministry, Virgin Prunes, and even Joy Division. There is supposedly the humorous Type O Negative qualities here also, according to DDS, but it just falls ultimately short on its face.
Track List:
01) Your Blood Runs Red
02) Sick
03) Rain Never Stops
04) No One can Tell you
05) Hell is Coming to Terry you Apart
06) HaHaaa
07) Fuck Heat
08) Fish Bowl
09) Grimm
10) Sax & Violins
Rating: 3/5
Written by: Munnin
Label: Dead Games Records (United States) / N/A / Digital
Gothic Rock / Gothic Metal
agosto 13th, 2014 
Queens of Steel
“I Am Dead” es cuanto menos una obra singular. Los creadores de este trabajo no son otros que DEAD DARK SLIDE, un combo que combina elementos industriales como Metal extremo como puede ser el Death Metal, pero todo ello de una manera única. Con ello no quiero decir que sea mejor ni peor, solamente que me ha sorprendido escuchar un trabajo tan singular.
