Dark Angel - Leave Scars

After listening to this again I realise that it is actually better than I initially thought it was.

Fuckin love this record. To me this is their best

I think this album is brilliant, the songs are really good and I don't even mind Ron's vocals. The bad production really hurt this one.

That is one bad Led Zeppelin cover 😅 Other than that, a decent release but not close to Darkness descends IMO.

The first 2 minutes of The Promise of Agony and the instrumental Cauterization are the only good things about this abortion. Atrocious production, bad mix, hilariously bad vocals and sloppily played. Baffling how this band devolved to the level of 1984-1987 German thrash bands in terms of instrumental performance.

This album might get better if it gets a remix/remaster (not re-recording). Some tunes have potential, like for example Death of Innocence or the beginning of No One Answered, but when you play the riffs through a toiletifier, it all amounts to nothing. With this kind of production and mixing, even remarkable thrash albums would've sounded sloppy. Imagine Reign in Blood or Master of Puppets with this kind of mix. They would've sounded bloody awful. The less we speak about the vocals, the better. Ron Rinehart is the black death among thrash vocalists. Sort of like Warrel Dane, but worse.

On No One Answered they actually do a dueling-solos type of Exodus thing at the end: what a damn mess. It's not so much dueling guitars as it's drunk pigeons tripping over each other.

Whoever prefers this over Darkness Descends must've went through some lobotomy process. Darkness Descends may not be a technically impressive album, but at least it has good songwriting, it is energetic and powerful, it has a good production and the vocals are not a hindrance. Leave Scars is the polar opposite. Sloppy, shoddy, amateurish.