Deathrow
Deception Ignored

It's October 3, 1984, when two boys just out of their teens, Sven Fugge and Markus Hahn, decide to move to Düsseldorf to try to break into the music scene. Here they meet Milo and Thomas Priebe, form Samhain, and soon find themselves under the wing of His Noise Label.

Just enough time to replace the band's original name with Deathrow (to avoid confusion with the homonymous Danzig band), and the debut album is released: "Riders of Doom" (1986). The sound is raw, the production is horrendous, the album comes out with two different names (!) and two different covers (!), the songwriting is immature, uncertain... and yet the album becomes a small cult: it's fast, angry, decently played and, most importantly, it reveals enormous potential. It takes just a year and the miracle repeats itself.
It's 1987 and it's the turn of "Raging Steel": it is the expected confirmation, the leap in quality, the step forward... nothing that hasn't been heard before, nothing truly original... just damn well done: while remaining staunchly anchored to the stylistic features of the genre and the era, the album is imbued with a changed compositional approach, made of decidedly more varied and complex riffs and arrangements as well as a greater use of melody.

However, Noise once again decides to be a pain: rejects the artwork proposed by the band, imposes another one without the group's approval, and, above all, sets a ridiculous budget for the next promotional tour. Despite everything, the audience appreciates it, the album sells well, but, in the aftermath of the success of "Raging Steel", comes yet another disappointment: Thomas leaves the band (tired of touring Europe in an old Volkswagen with just enough money to barely buy beer).
In his place, Uwe Osterlehner is recruited, a young and skilled guitarist with his first experience in a recording studio, contacted thanks to an ad published in a magazine... and it was a mess... Released in 1988, "Deception Ignored" is definitely the band's most controversial album: praised by critics and much appreciated by the audience of the time (to date it is the best-selling album in Deathrow's discography), it ended up being practically disowned by its own creators, labeled as a child of circumstances and the necessity to fulfill contractual obligations with the record label.

Certainly, if there ever was a progressive thrash (or techno thrash or whatever the hell you want), this album should undoubtedly be counted among its forerunners: if the previous "Raging Steel" was a monument to reasoned aggressiveness, a masterpiece built on canons already coded and "institutionalized" by others, "Deception Ignored" is an album born at the wrong time and in the wrong place, a child of frustration, bitterness, and unfulfilled promises, but also – it must be said - of ambition, disorientation, and a desire to overdo.
Nothing, or almost nothing, is simple in this album. Nothing, or almost nothing, is predictable. The same aggressiveness is no longer a direct and immediate concept: one is faced with the product of a delirious mind, with a compositional neurosis that sways between states of melodic lucidity and angry and violent ravings. What in previous albums was a compact block aimed straight at the listener's stomach here crumbles into a tangle of riffs, solos, accelerations, odd times, off-beat vocal lines: an organized sound chaos that, while astonishing and fascinating on one hand, confuses and disorients on the other.

Just take as an example the endless "Narcotic", perhaps the ultimate expression of the light and shadows of this album: nine and a half minutes of intricate rhythms chasing each other, arpeggios and acoustic breaks, exhausting arrangements that block adrenaline at the peak moment and, above all, a creative fury rarely heard until then in a thrash album, especially of Teutonic origin. "Deception Ignored" is not a masterpiece.
It certainly could have been if only there had been time for the band and, above all, for the newcomer Uwe (the true architect of the album's excessive showiness) to take up the threads of the evolutionary path begun with "Raging Steel", to regain an internal "compactness", to become, in short, a group.

Alas, it was not to be, and hence the main flaw of the album: the evident inhomogeneity of the compositions, their fragmentation, and the lack of cohesion between the various segments. At times, you really get the feeling of being faced with a ruthless cut/paste of undoubtedly ingenious riffs, but orphaned of a "song idea" to support and blend them. The excessively intricate rhythms leave very narrow margins for the vocals, and the constant time changes and atypical song structures do the rest.
The lyrics end up not being always effective, sometimes feeling forced and anything but captivating. Not surprisingly, the shorter and less dispersive compositions ("Never Lose Your Humour" and "Bureaucrazy"), as well as the instrumental "Triocton", shine the most.

Nonetheless, "Deception Ignored" remains a great album, whose beauty, however, is mortified as it is in the tangle of partitions, and certainly requires many (perhaps too many) listens to fully emerge. It remains an album to love or hate for what it is: perhaps a not fully successful experiment, perhaps the classic "step too far", certainly an attempt to convert the canons of a genre to a more reasoned and complex approach compared to what had been done until then by the same "founding fathers" of the genre.
With the release of the album, the band's popularity grew exponentially. Even this time, however, Noise managed to ruin everything: to promote the album's release, a tour in England with Sabbat was proposed to the band... but on the condition that the musicians themselves would pay their expenses! By then exasperated by an unsustainable situation, the band members decided to move away definitively from the label.

It took a good four years before they returned to release a new full-length (the excellent "Life Beyond", released in 1992 for WVR). Even in this case, unfortunately, the friction with label executives ended up having the upper hand over the music, so much so that the following year the band broke up definitively, leaving in all those who appreciated and appreciate their music the sensation of facing a great lost opportunity.