After HORRORSCOPE and KILLJOY, one more Thrash Metal release from Shark Records arrives. This time it is THE NO-MADS that will try to convince me about their Thrash Metal abilities. The other two albums were pretty nice and I want to believe that this album will be good enough to make me believe that Thrash Metal is still alive.

As HORRORSCOPE and KILLJOY, THE NO-MADS are from Poland, to be more precise from Katowice. They were formed in 1999. After four demo releases, they released their self-financed debut album, which I unfortunately haven't listened to. After a single (or promo) CD, they managed to sign a contract with the German label Shark Records. Under this label, they released their second full-length effort entitled Deranged.

I will start by saying that this album did not please me in the way the previous two Shark Records releases did. Deranged has been composed, produced and taken care of in a much more off-hand way. The first thing I would like to comment is the sound, that is not the best for an official full-length release, especially when we are talking about Thrash Metal and not underground Black or Death Metal stuff. Let's see what their music has to offer. THE NO-MADS is a band that even though bases its sound on classic Thrash Metal we originally got to know by bands like HEATHEN, RAZOR and NUCLEAR ASSAULT, it also combines Thrash with some more modern stuff like ARCH ENEMY. To tell you the truth, even though the result sounds interesting by the way I describe it, it is not what I expected to listen and it shows that the band still hasn't managed to stand on its own two feet on a decent level. The vocals definitely need a lot of work. The compositions are also based on some common riffs and nothing in general seems to be able to keep the listener interested until the end of the album.

It is not a bad album but as I previously said the band needs a lot of work to deliver something much better than Deranged. I think that they are a talented band and they can do much better than this. Until their next full-length release...