When DEADLY BLESSING’s one and only full length album “Ascend From The Cauldron” reared its ugly head way back in 1988 the opinions concerning the band were always pretty mixed. It was either “love it” or “hate it” with no real options in between… The main reason was basically the extremely high-pitched vocal delivery of singer Ski, who immediately became the trademark for this US based five-piece. The band nevertheless managed to gain themselves a die hard underground following (mostly in Europe) but unfortunately disappeared into nothingness again shortly after the album’s initial release. Apart from their hard to swallow vocal style it most certainly was the lack of support from their label at the time (New Renaissance Records) that (financially) prevented DEADLY BLESSING from reaching the next level. So, it was certainly no blessing, but actually quite deadly to be connected to them… If you listen to DEADLY BLESSING’s material nowadays it still sounds extremely unique, yet less over the top as there’s been a lot more bands with intense vocalists ever since (just take CONFESSOR as an example). And even though Ski had a clean voice DEADLY BLESSING were by no means a cheesy sounding melodic band, but definitely Metal to the bone with several references to classic 80s Thrash / Speed Metal as well! Their songs easily stood the test of time and still blow away a lot of the material that gets released these days! In that respect DEADLY BLESSING die hards will highly appreciate the release of “An Eye To The Past”, which is an eleven track compilation of old demo / unreleased tracks. In detail the album comprises of the band’s classic three song demo from 1986, which featured ‘Search And Destroy’, ‘Cry Of Medusa’ and the non album track ‘Queen Of Sin’, two rehearsal songs from the same year, as well as demo recordings from 1987 and 1988, some of them already feature Larry Betson on vocals, who replaced Ski after the release of “Ascend From The Cauldron” and who’s surprisingly blessed with a pretty similar voice! The sound quality is ok (considering that we’re dealing with demos from the 80s here!) and the CD packaging compliments the overall good impression even more (lots of vintage pictures, lyrics and a historical related short interview). So, my advice to every 80s Metal worshipper simply is: go for it! Available directly from www.hellionrecords.de