They Rise

It's a crying shame how overlooked Kam Lee really is. He's one of death metal's first ever musicians, but because of his egotistical attitude issues and inability to get along with anybody, people often remember what an asshole he can be before they remember his vocals. Which sucks majorly, since he is a truly brilliant songwriter and musician. While most people know him for his work on Massacre's "From Beyond", he has so many other great albums. The first truly death metal album he made after 16 years of absence ("Promise" doesn't count), "They Rise" by Denial Fiend, is the true follow-up to Kam's landmark debut in the death metal industry, and the start of his recent strive to start the musical journey he was always meant to take.

Despite being released in 2007, the sound of the album is extremely old-school, and by old-school I mean really classic, serving as a throwback to the thrashy old days of death metal, with a sense of purity that very few can bring to the table nowadays. There's a fine line between old-school and outdated. Outdated is when a sound that had been done to death by mediocre bands is risen from the ashes long after its burial despite hardly anybody wanting it to exist in the first place (I'm looking at you, nu-metal). Old-school is exactly as it implies; classic. A sound that was fresh when it began and continues to stay relevant in the modern age. "They Rise" is the latter.

From the first few seconds of the first song, it doesn't hold back as its title track's galloping rhythms and primitive vocals bring to mind the earliest death metal along the lines of Possessed and company, while at the same time wearing its modern production quality on its shoulders. Kam, even after over a decade of absence, sounds just as fierce as he did when he was with Massacre. Arguably the easiest death metal vocalist to understand, he opts for a decipherable grunt that remains his own, expanding on the technique he developed with his first band. He manages to remain brutal as all hell, oh yes, so don't worry about that.

The lyrics are typical death metal fare, stuff about the undead, corpses, and shit like that. It's nothing you haven't heard before, but when you have songs as riff-tastic and catchy as "Return to the Tombs of the Cursed Blind Dead" and "Frankenstein Conquers the World", innovation is not something you'll get, or even should be expecting. It's thrashy, old-school (with a real emphasis on that last one) death metal and nothing else. But "They Rise" is done so well that as long as you're a fan of death metal, you will get something out of it. It does nothing new, but it does what it does as well as it can. There isn't a whole lot to say about it, but it begins Kam Lee's resurrected career in a strong way.