DEAD LINE

This is the debut of a Tokyo band formed in 1984, put out on their own Night Gallery label in June 1986. With nothing but independent distribution it sold somewhere around twenty thousand copies, and it has been talked about in Japanese heavy metal ever since. The line-up at this point is MORRIE on vocals, TAKAHIRO on guitar, CRAZY COOL JOE on bass and TANO on drums. It is not the line-up the band is known by from its major-label years: there is one guitarist here, not two. On the skeleton of fast metal sit a decadent choice of words and MORRIE's delivery, which forces the voice out rather than singing over the band. The vocabulary is not that of the Western heavy metal Japanese bands were then modelling themselves on, and that difference is the band's position. Danger Crue Records reissued it on 11 November 2009 as DCCL-12/13, the first pressing carrying a DVD of a concert at Mainichi Hall in Osaka on 11 January 1987. The album is on neither Spotify nor the iTunes Store, so this page leads with the sleeve.