In the process of reviewing music for Teufel’s Tomb, I commonly listen to albums in one of three places: at home with a healthy supply of IPA, at work, or in the car.   My day job requires a frequent amount of local travel so I initially listened to the Dutch metal band Dead Heads’ 5th full-length album Depression Tank on my car stereo, which turned out to be a bad thing for them as far as this review is concerned.

I say this because during the course of listening to Depression Tank I started thinking about a variety of other things.   Most notably, I was able to compile a full grocery list in my head while the album played.   While I wanted to focus my attention on the album I instead found myself debating whether I wanted crunchy or creamy peanut butter along with deciding if I needed quilted or plain 2-ply toilet paper.   Believe me when I say that these two decisions are not quite as unrelated as they may appear.   In other words, Depression Tank became background music very quickly.

In general, this is not an easy thing to accomplish.   Most of the time, whatever music I am listening to will be either good enough to keep my interest or so fucking God-awful that I have to pay attention long enough to hit the ‘stop’ button.   Dead Head is almost so perfectly bland that it was almost like driving while having Mrs. Piledriver in the car with me as she droned on about her day and how I ‘just don’t understand’ how difficult everything is in her life – I was able to tune everything out peacefully.   To put this in visual perspective, it’s not unlike the scene from The Simpson’s Movie when there is a monkey clapping hand cymbals together in Homer’s mind while Marge is yelling at him about his silo of pig shit.

Anyway, upon further listening I found Depression Tank to sound like the musical equivalent of an adolescent teenager struggling through puberty.   The band tries to sound pissed off and intimidating but comes across sounding clumsy and awkward.   The tempo changes sound forced and don’t blend well at all, as the first two songs “Dissolved In Purity” and “Green Angel” make torturously clear.   The guitar work of Ronnie Van Der Weij and Robbie Woning are basic pentatonic scale runs over some mid-paced and fast riffs, and the vocals of Ralph de Boer sound like he may have once spent time in a Kreator tribute band.

Lyrically, the band is incredibly juvenile, with lines like ‘Seven years of darkness/Seven years of pain/Seven year of emptiness’ from the song “Firegate” just doing absolutely nothing for me.   I am also far past the point in my life where I need hear the phrase “bring it down” during the breakdown of “Cryptocynic,” as well as lyrics that tell me there’s both ‘nowhere to run’ and ‘nowhere to hide.’   Really??  Jesus Fucking Christ – Depression Tank, indeed.

Amazingly, Dead Head manage to pull of sounding so irrelevant despite the fact they apparently have been around in some form or another since 1989.   This is the first time I’ve ever heard of them, and while I’m sure the band won’t be losing sleep over that fact I can honestly say I haven’t been missing very much.

To be fair, I’ve always found thrash to be analogous to marijuana.   It’s really just a gateway to more extreme experimentation of musical styles.   Think about it.  You probably haven’t known someone who was into bands like Cannibal Corpse or Pig Destroyer who hadn’t already been listening to Kreator and Slayer.   It just doesn’t flow that way.   Unfortunately for Dead Head the more time I spend thinking about this the worse my opinion of them becomes.   There is absolutely nothing new here so unless mediocre thrash is your thing, stay very far away from this.

Review byPile Driver