Artist: High Speed Death
Country: Italy
Label: La Caverna Records
Formats: CD
Year: 2025
The Bogotá, Colombia based label La Caverna Records decided to take a really deep dive into someone’s old tapes collection. At least, so it seems, as the label unearthed a couple of really obscure demo tapes and decided to hand them over to the capable Patrick W. Engel to restore some of the music’s old glory. One of those tapes is the only ever-recorded official demo tape of High Speed Death, ‘Damed Genesis’, that originally appeared sometime in 1991. And, in all fairness, it is a remarkably fun demo that captures a lot of the wild Italian underground scene from the early 90’s. Prepare for basically everything that sounds extreme put into a good couple of songs.
As was quite normal these days, especially from bands from non-Western areas, the concept of “demo” was mostly just sticking as many tracks as possible on a tape – or at least as many as they were able to play. That makes that this re-issue is no less than 40 minutes in length. Admittedly, the last two tracks were taken from an more or less unofficial rehearsal tape from 1990 that only some real fanatic tape traders might have hear before.
Musically, as mentioned above, High Speed Death most likely aimed for a musical melting pot of everything that they liked. That means that there is some Death Metal and even Black Metal in here, but also a clear penchant for Heavy Metal-fuelled Thrash/Thrashy Metal. They literally go from left to right and back again. From speedy (and rather chaotic) parts to “melodic” guitar leads and top it off with great evil-sounding vocals. That means that the music suffers a bit from the lack of coherence, but, especially anno 2025, the youthful energy and the overall enjoyment of these old school recordings make up for just everything that High Speed Death is missing.
Still, also on a musical level there is more than enough to enjoy. Even this early on in their career, it is clear that these musicians had some talent to show off (some of them later went on to play in bands such as Crepuscule, Funeral Oration and Gory Blister). They just didn’t yet have the experience to channel it into really good and compact tracks. Their feeling for real song writing was obviously still rather undeveloped. But if anything, ‘Damned Genesis’ captures the zeitgeist perfectly, there are literally hundreds of demos from, roughly, between 1988 to 1993, that sound pretty much alike, but most of them faded into oblivion, So, every now and then it is nice to see some of these brought back to life again.
