DEW-SCENTED – Issue VI (Remastered)

Dew-Scented’s Impact was a cornerstone in their career. It made them a total Modern Thrash Metal monster with a reaching hand to knock on the doors of the holy triplet of German Thrash. However, their next in line album, Issue VI, took that reaching arm and shoved it right back into the pocket it laid in earlier. Summing up the words of Leif Jensen, founder and long time vocalist of the band, the band wanted to scale above Impact, and boy that was a hard task. In the end, Dew-Scented couldn’t top that album, yet Issue VI can’t be considered to be a failure, especially when it was amazingly engineered by Dew-Scented’s constant producer, Andy Classen.

Maybe one of the reasons why Issue VI couldn’t compete with its previous contender was because the absence of Florian Muller from the guitar post. Due to personal reasons, Muller was out of Dew-Scented due to lack of work time with the band. That state left Hendrik Bache, who made his debut on Impact, to “party” alone with the compositions. Even the band’s new bass player, Alexander Pahl, didn’t participate in the writing of the material for Issue VI, as he only debuted on the recording process. You can compare that same situation with what happened to Florian Muller when he joined Dew-Scented back on the Inwards album, but the final results back then were different.

The idea was to complex things up. What was actually done here by Dew-Scented was to jump from one formula to another, and that was basically it. Muller’s creativeness and the harmonious effort with Bache truly lacked on this album. However, in some areas, it was even thrashier than the sounds of Impact. There is a fine crossing here between Slayer and Destruction with a twist of hard stuff taken out of Death Metal. In addition, and unlike Impact, this album has a chunk load of widespread solo attacks. Bache and session / live guitarist Marvin Vriesde (Severe Torture), crossed their axes with a cool brand of peak and powerful moments. Besides a few of the songs here, the solos were one of the strongest elements this album had to put forward.

So exactly what do you have here on Issue VI in terms of songs? Well, “could be better” is the only adjective that can rate this overall release, which means that the tunes show effort but they didn’t live up to the new standard the band set two years prior. Tunes like “Turn To Ash”, “The Prison Of Reason” and “Conceptual End”, which was presented as a classic form of a Dew-Scented tune, were the best of what the band could come by. In general, there is a wide potential and it can be heard on “Processing Life”, “Full Blow Revenge”, “Out Of The Self” and “The Torrent”. Most of the other tunes come across as being generic. Complex or not, Issue VI didn’t cover the ground that the band aimed to accomplish. Yet, it has a good vibe in it and if the right folks were on board, it could have been another blaster.

Metal Mind Productions, in their series of remastered Dew-Scented albums, did another great remastering job and introduced two additional tracks that were inserted as bonus tracks on different versions of the album (American and Japanese) and a special video clip enhancement of their star track,”Turn To Ash”. Both audio tracks, “Full Blown Revenge” and “The Torrent”, should have been originally inserted on this one. However, those weren’t officially included.

Tracklist

1. Processing Life
2. Rituals of Time
3. Turn to Ash
4. Ruins of Hope
5. Out of the Self
6. The Prison of Reason
7. Bled Dry
8. In Defeat
9. Never to Return
10. Vortex
11. Conceptual End
12. Evil Dead (Zeke Cover)
13. Full Blown Revenge
14. The Torrent

Lineup

Leif Jensen – Vocals
Hendrik Bache – Guitars
Alexander Pahl – Bass
Uwe Werning – Drums
Marvin Vriesde – Session Lead Guitars