Album Review: Duel, Breakfast With Death
Alright, buckle up, because it’s time to get theoretical. What if Duel have been thrash all along?
Sit with that for a minute and think about what it might mean. I’m not saying the Austin, Texas, four-piece — whose fifth album, Breakfast With Death, arrives via Heavy Psych Sounds with sinister, chipped-tooth grins a-plenty across its air-tight nine songs/38 minutes — are just that, necessarily. They’ve never sounded specifically like they’re aiming for the kind of ground one might expect Exodus or Kreator to cover, or even necessarily High on Fire. But as they delve further along the lines of brash-gnash burl offered by 2021’s In Carne Persona (review here) with ever sharper turns and a presence in the recording bolstered through lead guitarist/backing vocalist Jeff Henson‘s emergence as a producer for his own band and a slew of others — rhythm guitarist/lead vocalist Tom Frank also produced; Henson engineered and mixed, and Alberto de Icaza mastered — the vision of sound from which Duel are working has become accordingly more refined beneath its outward grit. And they revel in nasty. Hearing them at their most aggressive, in songs like “Chaos Reigns” or the bruising closer “Burn the Earth,” Frank, Henson, bassist/backing vocalist Drew Potter and drummer Patrick “Scooch” Pascucci are downright gleeful in their charge.
Eight years on from their debut, 2016’s Fears of the Dead (review here), it’s not that this is something new. Instead, it’s a core feature of what makes Duel the band they are. An essential characteristic of their work is the element of danger that the whole thing might unravel even as their grip on craft gets tighter. But while Breakfast With Death is also the most punk rock they’ve been in cuts like “Ancient Moonlight” and “Satan’s Invention” at the outset, the second half of the penultimate “Greet the Dead” and the catchy Ramones-y centerpiece “Pyro,” they’re also unquestionably a metal band. And a heavy rock band. So where does thrash come in? Thrash rock, maybe, if not thrash metal (though I don’t think they’d shy away from being called a metal band either, even if it’s not a complete encapsulation)? How is it that, along with the hook in “Chaos Reigns,” I can’t get the idea of Duel as a thrash band out of my frickin’ head?
Well, on the most basic level, a lot of what the do is fast. And if you have metal — which you do, as any number of the dual solos, anti-dogma lyrics and intentions toward violence throughout highlight — and you have punk, at a certain point that math is going to get you to speedy, careening grooves and the furious, headbanging thrust that takes hold after the drum-fill intro to “Fallacy” and the earliest-Metallica riff at the root of “Berserker.” But with Duel, it’s as much about the uncompromising ethic from which their work arises as it is about tempo. They’re not without dynamic — “Burn the Earth” unveils a pummel that’s clearly been held in reserve for the end of the record, the backing vocals that are such a part of the first impression in the lead verse of “Ancient Moonlight,” then show up again in “Satan’s Invention” as well as the call and response that resolves “Chaos Reigns” after the shredding solo, showcasing an element of forward growth that’s been taking place in their studio work all along — but they leave no question that their heart is in the shove that moves the listener from one end of Breakfast With Death to the other. That physicality is central to their purpose, here and elsewhere in their catalog. It’s what makes them such a fiery live act as well, and maybe that’s what’s underlying all the energy and force of delivery that seems to manifest in the recording here. Who Duel are onstage.
This would account for the swagger and scorch with which “Ancient Moonlight” leads off, as well as the focus on shorter, more immediate cuts generally. Duel have never been ones for subtlety, but their maturity seems to find them focused on how songs would work as part of a setlist, and just about all of Breakfast With Death would. It’s maybe not such a stark shift from what their approach has been since the beginnings of the band, but if one regards their albums as stages — or in terms now decidedly Swiftian, ‘eras’ — then each has been a step in terms of progress from the last and sure enough, Breakfast With Death‘s nine cuts are shorter on average than the nine of In Carne Persona, and at whatever angle a given song is throwing elbows and stomp-kicking in a circular march, part hardcore kid, part lumbering metalhead the movement is inexorably forward. This works in the band’s favor because the songs are more than just stops along the way to the finish. “Ancient Moonlight” and “Satan’s Invention” both hint toward vocal melody in a way that Frank‘s signature gruff, shouted delivery has rarely done to this point in their tenure. Not never, but in listening it feels like more of a reason those two were selected as the opening salvo, though of course that’s not to take away from the sheer push on offer in that particular seven-plus-minute stretch, either.
One could argue the commitment to representing their live show ‘on tape’ is an element born out of thrashier impulses as well, but to my ears it’s more about how Duel wear what they do on their sleeve. I’m not trying to downplay either the classic heavy rock dynamic between the two guitars, the punk, the heavy, the metal or anything else that has let them speak to multiple niches over the last eight years, but increasingly over that time, Duel know who they are, know what they’re about as a band, and are going to hit you with that in a straightforward, defiantly unpretentious way as hard as they can. Breakfast With Death hits enough marks to let one honestly say they shift gears here and there, but as with Kreator, or Destruction, or the best of Slayer, you know as a listener going into a record who you’re dealing with and what they do, and increasingly, Duel benefit from the expectation of that kind of intensity-as-priority as they continue to evolve as songwriters and performers. It suits them, and that they meet the high standards they set for themselves is no less an aspect of their identity at this point than anything aurally wrought in their material.
Duel, Breakfast With Satan (2024)
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