No one should lay your hopes and desires in the past. Hope is for the future, and you must work now for having the best some time ahead. Translating these words to the world of music, one can't live in the past, because it's carved in stone and will not change, and never come back. And to play Old School Metal genres demands of the musicians to breathe a new life on them, to play something different of what is already done. Some can do it, others can't do, and the North American quintet KOMMAND, hailing from California (do not confound them with the Washington Black/Thrash Metal act of the same name) shows some ambiguities on "Death Age".

Their musical work is a form of Old School Death Metal based on the work of acts of UK, Sweden, Germany and Netherlands of the long gone days of the late 80's/early 90's. It's raw and putrid as the early works of CARNAGE, MORGOTH, ASPHYX, SINISTER, DISMEMBER, MORGOTH and others of the same wave, but KOMMAND isn't trying to copy them, but use of their own personality using the clichés they left. They have talent to go further than what's shown on this release, but it's not as bad as can seem. The main problem of the band lays on the sound quality. Once again: the Old School Death Metal feeling has nothing to do with the way one sounds, but how one plays. This putrid and crude sonority, trying to sound organic and Old School in this way is something artificial. It's not bad, but sounds like a 90's wannabe.

Musically, one can say that very good ideas appear on "Death Age", especially on songs as "Final Virus" (the slow paced tempos show a strong and solid work of bass guitar and drums, and there are many hooking clichés here and there), "Global Death" (again very good slow tempos can be heard, but this time, the arrangements and guitar riffs are really very good), and on "Collapse Metropolis" (the grunts are good, but could be better fitting on the band's instrumental). But it seems sometimes as the band brings their favorite Death Metal albums to the studio to hear as they rehearsal and record, what's not allowed to be done. Maybe a talk with Dan Swäno would benefit the band, for understanding how to be an Old School Death Metal act without sounding as a wannabe.

For now, "Death Age" is the kind of release that aims for a short public, and the tendency is to be heard once, and to be left hidden somewhere in the disk collection. But KOMMAND just need to mature a bit more and expose what they really are.