Noise keeps the crucial reissues coming with this classic slab of offbeat thrash metal, my favorite of the band's catalog. There was another reissue of this album several years ago on Divebomb, but that's been out of print for awhile, so if you still need this tech-slammer (or need it on vinyl, appearing here on wax for the first time in decades), here ya go.

Here's the deal: the 1988 album Deception Ignored was an entirely unexpected follow-up to the band's prior two albums of aggressive (if fairly by-the-numbers) Teutonic thrash. While Deathrow's earlier works were firmly in the Kreator / Sodom mode of tightly wound Germanic thrash metal, their third full-length saw the addition of new guitarist Uwe Osterlehner, and with him came a newfound complexity and progginess that saw them joining the ranks, albeit briefly, of such legendary bands as Coroner, Voivod and Watchtower. It's a quantum jump from the earlier material, and turned this album into one of the key texts in the technical thrash field of the late 1980s.

Much like that killer Midas Touch double disc reissue that I've also written about recently, Deathrow's Deception Ignored has long been another criminally overlooked slab of prog-thrash that had originally been released on Noise Records, and in this case is actually one of the best album's of its kind from the era - Watchtower fans in particular will want to hear the insane left-field riffing, weird jazzy chords and whiplash-inducing time signature shifts on display here, balanced against hammering thrash riffs, and Osterlehner's guitar skills are seriously impressive. Like Watchtower, Deathrow were now delivering extremely angular and unpredictable thrash songs that were filled with eerie soaring leads, jagged, whacked-out riffs, jazzy fills and flourishes, and constantly changing time signature changes that brought a whole new level of compositional complexity to their sound, while maintaining those high quality riffs with plenty of heaviness and a persistent ominous vibe, even when they do stuff like suddenly wheel out a piano and pipe organ at the beginning of "Triocton" for a few minutes of moody melody. Other key moments of offbeat technicality and confusional crush include the nearly ten-minute "Narcotic", an awesome, mind-melting shredfest that fuses Osterlehner crazed, mathy staccato riffing with what is easily the album's most ferocious circle-pit anthem.

This was Deathrow's one and only foray into seriously complex, prog-influenced thrash; after this, they would return to a more conventional (but still somewhat quirky) sound on their final album Life Beyond, as the records suggest that the other members were less interested in playing this sort of challenging, Watchtower-esque math-thrash. It's a damn shame, as Deathrow produced a minor classic of progressive thrash metal with Deception Ignored, and it's by far my favorite of all of their albums.

Pretty essential stuff for anyone into the experimental, prog-influenced end of the 80's thrash underground of bands like Anacrusis, DBC, the aforementioned Watchtower, Voivod, Coroner, Toxik, and the like.

This Noise reissue features a new remastering job (sounds great) and delivers the album on both digipak CD and limited edition vinyl.