Heathen - Victims of Deception (1991)^{Release ID: 2977}

Before hearing this album, I'd only listened to Heathen's previous outing Breaking the Silence. While I didn't find anything amazing on that release, I found it to be decent enough thrash metal. Despite my lukewarm reaction to that album, I thought I'd check out Victims of Deception due to incredibly high rating on this site. After all, any album averaging over 4.00 with 186 votes simply must be a metal classic! Well...I'm stunned! This album isn't terrible, but it's not a classic, that's for sure.

The drumming is adequate if uninteresting, the vocals are ordinary, the lyrics are corny and contrived. The tracks are often overlong with most venturing well past the 6-minute mark. The only thing that saves the album at all is an occasional good riff or lead. The guitarists can clearly play, there's no doubt about that. Some of the solos are technically great. But the song structures rarely excite me and every now and then, make me cringe.

There seem to be several reviews comparing Victims of Deception to Metallica's late 80s period. They are similar in that they produce lightweight thrash metal with some great guitar work, but Heathen have nowhere near the song writing capability of that band, nor a vocalist capable of taking these tracks to a higher level. I'm going to slot this in the hugely overrated basket alongside Sabbat, Exodus and Nuclear Assault.

Heathen's Victims of Deception is a victim of bloating.  Like it obviously knows when it has eaten too much but just carries on stuffing it's face regardless.  I find it hard to believe that such clearly proficient musicians are unable to see when they are writing just for writings sake.  Three tracks of this album feels like about an hour has passed already and still there's more courses to come.

Notwithstanding the fact that the album structure is overbearing in terms of song length it also very random with Rainbow's Kill The King parked at track number four (ironically it is the most enjoyable track on side A).  The penultimate track on side B is a pointless instrumental piece with a wanky name to boot.  Guitarmony (yes, really folks) just gives the duo of Doug Piercy and Lee Altus an excuse to stroke their cocks for three and a half minutes instead of subjecting the listener to eight tracks of lengthy and dominating thrash metal.

The massive frustration here is that the album is supposed to be getting a bit of a bashing in this review but I still can't avoid awarding it three stars because the quality of the riffing and lead work is good, there's just too much of it.  The drumming of Darren Minter is solid throughout and the powerful vocals of David Godfrey (White/Godfrey-White, who the fuck knows?) are a fantastic accompaniment also.  It is just an album in dire need of a trim or at least and edit session on almost every track to bring the run time down to a more palatable portion.