This album, 'The Dreams You Dread', is not Benediction's demo reissued, but the band's 4th studio album from over a decade ago. When it was released, it was by and large bashed. Some of you might remember the video for 'Down on Whores (Leave Them All for Dead)' spinning on MTV's Headbanger's Ball, being almost the sole death metal clip doing rounds at the time.

'The Dreams You Dread' is a very mid-tempo cenotaph of chugging death metal. Basically, this is very old school, simplistic yet not minimalistic death metal with nice toppings. Generally, chunky and crunchy riffs are good and are accompanied with acoustic and non-distorted playing to give more colouring. And talking about the atmosphere, the horror melodies (think of Entombed's two first albums) are abound here. Sometimes there's a tangible hardcore feel in some of the songs. The riffs are hacking, and slower ones can create huge walls of guitars due to huge distortion utilized. The lead guitar work is far and wide which is a shame, as hearing something like 'Negative Growth' is refreshing among more riff-based material. The bass guitar is used more than just as a typical "backbeat" instrument. Drumming of the new boy Neil Hutton is embellished with small tricks. At times the band accelerate into faster speeds, which is vitally important for this album, but still can't save it from some a tad boring moments on the way. Anyway, most of the songs are very memorable.

Groove is another positive segment, making this "gotta-headbang-to-this-fucker" kind of an album. The production is very clean and nicely balanced, but still heavy and above all, organic. Despite the medium speed, the energy flows well within the music. At least between the instrumentalists. I simply do not like too much about Dave Ingram's vocals, which are raw, mildly distorted bellowing, but simply quite annoying because they are not diverse at all. He sounds like less brutal and powerful Barney Greenaway (of Napalm Death, also on the first Benediction album). The lyrics include some rather interesting topics. One of them is 'Down on Whores (Leave Them All for Dead)', which text is a collage of quotes from James Maybrick's (probably a.k.a. Jack The Ripper) diary. The other ones are about usual madness, war and death (just what do you expect from a death metal album, eh???).

Death's Chuck Schuldiner took the band on tour, saying that there was no better band to tour with than Benediction, and was his only possible choice for the support act. 'The Dreams You Dread' isn't that good an album, but it has aged more than well and if you opt for groovy, bulldozing death metal, you could do much, much worse than pick this fucker up.

Updated view (05/22/2019 by Lane): The album has been on some rotation during all the years after I reviewed it; almost bloody 13 years ago! I've simply found the POWER of the riffs it holds!!! Awesome stuff, indeed. If the vocals were a tad more lethal, it would be even highr score I wanted to update this to: From a mere 6½ to 8...

Rating: 8 (out of 10) ratings explained

Reviewed by Lane
06/21/2006 21:42