"The Trail" is the fourth album by DEMONIC DEATH JUDGE (2009) who launch their langskip from Kotka and the lovely Kymijoki River, renowned for having the best salmon fishing in southern Finland. This release follows "Seaweed," "Skydogs," and "The Descent." The lads had planned to go a-pillaging on tour this Spring 2020 but we know how that story goes - Doom and Destruction cancelled by a wee but deadly virus.

"Cougar Charmer" opens "The Trail" with a moody old-timey musical passage of cotton field guitar picking, crows squawking in sonata-allegro. After a minute and a half, this musical scrabble leads us into "Filthy as Charged" and puts us up against the wall ... spread, read and ready for the lead. This tune sounds like a VELVET REVOLVER song, but the part where Weiland (RIP) would have come in has Jaakko swinging in on a doom pendulum rasping off chunks of wood with his coarse, sandpaper vocals and taking us down to the stump while Toni shakes out the riffs. Righteous.

"Hardship" just smokes up the groove and mates, these cats do not give up one notch on the bass and guitar overdrive. Eetu has a lovely tone and mix, not the total Ampeg cannon or electro-synth goo, more double barreled bass boom that stands these songs up proper and lets Toni lay down an IRON MAIDEN guitar refrain while Jaakko continues to sand us down with his vocals growling "thru hardship ... we fight ... with our last breath...". 'Elevation' puts Eetu on the bass dirge duty while the song ticks off a neato bass interlude. Eetu throws down on this song and likewise on this whole release, he rocks.

'Shapeshifting Serpents' has a KYUSS viper pit groove, ripe for deviltry with it's teasing FLOYD outro. With a cool ant bugle lick at 3:45 in the song, 'Flood' lifts off right proper and while I dig the square mix, it is here I notice that I would like a bit more greasy splatter, more slip and slide versus the solid ore soldering down the traces. This is a heavy duty one-guitar player production and the music drops conveniently into metal rage where I would like to hear more dark side of the spoon. By the way lads, I was going to note that I got a momentary music dropout on the transition between 'Flood' and the instrumental 'Fountain of Acid', songs which are meant to flow together uninterrupted.

I consulted my streaming Lord TIDAL and see this dropout is only found on my digital file download - strange. 'Cougar Charmer (Reprise)' loses the crows squawking and opens the canned harmonica on a rather tense feeling interlude, like standing on a dark street corner in Helsinki swilling vodka waiting for the cops to bust your groove. 'The Trail' is my favorite on this disc, a 9 minute cut of burning sand and camel humps, parching me as if in a sandstorm trudging towards the oasis of lesser Babylon while 'The Trail' paces every wandering step the caravan takes cross the Sinai. This slog reminds me of the mighty PELICAN with vocals; we all know how brilliant that is. 'We Have to Kill' is a rehash mish and mash groove of what came before that allows Jaakko to sound almost tender when he sings "This time we will, this time we have to ... oh lord we have to kill." If that don't bring a tear to your eye then you are sho'nuff one stone cold mutha fucker. Blues harp makes a second appearance for added flavor.

DEMONIC DEATH JUDGE will be heading back out on the show circuit this September 2020, so let's catch up to them and have us a drink on 'THE TRAIL' with them. Where must we go ... we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?  Go to the dani bandolier Spotify playlist of reviewed bands...

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/272H3UBARsuksY3BqU0CzP?si=LlTsjod7RwmwGxYi1zrbww