The full debut studio album by three piece black metal blues band DREADLORDS, called "Death Angel", is something else. Yes, black metal blues. You read that right. DREADLORDS, with members from PANTHER MODERN and T.O.M.B. play a kind of heavy, lurid and slow Blues, with Black Metal influences but also with a lot of winks to Mississippi Delta Blues guitarists like BB KING and ROBERT JOHNSON. It's like watching some Scandinavian dudes picking cotton in a graveyard. They say their baby left them and they're sad about it, but also that they will drink the bitch's blood if they ever run into her again.

That being said, the album starts off straightforward, with their intentions showing very clearly  from the beginning, but it takes a little bit getting used to their original style. When the first songs, "Going To The Well" and "Alone" are over, and you get to "Born Into The Arms", you can start to fully appreciate their unique sound and style. Don't forget it's actually a very risking combination, but DREADLORDS pulls it off.

An important theme throughout the album is religion, or rather the lack of it. In "Born Into Arms" they sing 'Jesus never wanted to hang with us, so we nailed his ass to a tree', and also in that song they set some churches ablaze.  So I guess that point of view is as clear as it gets. In "Lives In Me", a rather more Gospel than Blues sounding song, they openly preach blasphemy. So, that makes it Gospel-like and the opposite of Gospel at the same time, right?

The message in "I Live In A Graveyard" is very clear as well. And you know what, I can actually see them doing it. They may sing the Blues, but all the while they keep it very macabre, very sinister. So you can feel blue thanks to the dark and sad qualities from two very different genres combined together. Through "Thieves Of Faith" and "Take My Soul", they keep up their weird new voice in metal, until they finish the album off with "Odin", and ode to the Norwegian God of death. So maybe they should've called the song "Odein". Okay that was a bad one. Sorry. Anyway, DREADLORDS get an eight for their album and a ten for originality. Definitely worth checking out.