Band:	Dead On
Album:	Dead On
Style:	US power metal
Release date:	1989
Guest review by:	JOPE OF STEELE

01. Salem Girls
02. Beat A Dead Horse
03. The Widower
04. The Matador's Nightmare
05. Full Moon
06. Escape
07. Merry Ship
08. Different Breed
09. Dead On

The front cover of the album has a picture of a headbanging guy playing guitar on stage. Not the most spectacular front cover it could possibly be, even if it's an '80s thrash metal album. The picture of the band in the booklet, on the other hand, raises higher hopes for the album by telling us that we're not dealing with posers here.

Thrash metal is the most dominant genre in Dead On's sound, but there's a strong influence of both heavy and power metal as well. The strongest bits of the album would be "The Matador's Nightmare", which leads the listener into a bullfighting ring with an amazing intro and it charges into a furious pace after that. "Escape" has magnificent riffs accompanied by powerful backing vocals, with "Different Breed" being the stand-out song of the album. The lyrics are about very generic topics but other than that there are lyrics about death and the occult themes. So not anything amazingly original or innovative, but that wasn't surprisingly unexpected either.

The vocalist Mike Raptis is at the top of his game on this record; he sounds unique and does an amazing job on vocals combining both thrash-y shouts and clean vocals. The backing vocals are powerful and sound enthusiastic. The songs wouldn't be the same without them. The album has a lot of good and memorable riffs that will stay in your mind for ages (the finest example of this is the riff from "Merry Ship" sounding like Iron Maiden's "Two Minutes to Midnight" intro riff, but even better). The guitar leads and solos are decent as well. The drumming is solid, somewhat reminiscent of Joe Cangelosi's (Whiplash) drumming. The overall sound of the album is sharp and clean which is a rather common thing in '80s heavy metal recordings. The bass guitar is mixed on higher volume than in most metal records (reminding me of Iron Maiden's albums), which is positive because there's actually some good bass playing here.

In conclusion I would recommend this album to people who like old school thrash, speed, power, or heavy metal. In comparison to other fairly similar albums - such as Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? by Megadeth, Insult To Injury by Whiplash, Annihilation Principle by Lääz Rockit and In Search Of Sanity by Onslaught - I would say this album is up to par with those albums or maybe even better. Go get it, I know it might be hard to find this album but it's really worth it.