Deliverance

Item: Back In The Day: The First Four Years
Author: D_Lister

Back In The Day: The First Four Years

(2000)

Reviewed by D_Lister

Discogs YouTube

Label Magdalene RecordsDead Zine2000

heavy metal speed metal thrash metal

This CD is for a very selective group of listeners. Let's see, if you own all of the KMG re-issues of Deliverance's early CDs and those are fine with you...don't buy this CD. If you own Weapons... and one or two other D CDs and those are all you felt inclined to get...don't buy this CD. If you own all the D albums from Stay of Execution on and are not interested in the earlier CDs...don't buy this CD.

However if you have been listening to Deliverance since their first two tracks on California Metal (or at least since their first self-titled album) and you feel TRUE Deliverance ended with Weapons... if you still have T-Shirt, stickers or patches from the old days, if you still drive around blasting the first couple of albums in your car because "there just is no better driving music" if you can actually pronounce "Khairullah" and know who he was...then this CD is for you.

The one thing to keep in mind is you DO NOT buy this CD for the music. As hard as that may seem it's true. On it Jimmy does 5 tracks of narration, one of which he calls the music quality 100% Horrendous. Well, he nailed it. However the plus you can attach to that is every track presented is completely unreleased. Some of them are songs we have on other CDs but these early (and very RAW) versions have never seen the light of day. The other BIG plus is the inclusion of 4 songs that have never been on any other Deliverance CD ever. Two of them are instrumentals that let you in on where the band REALLY started.

This CD is cool to own and was a lot of fun to listen to basically because of the narration and getting a little of that old school dirty feel songs. However it's not going to see much spin time by anyone, not even me...and I consider myself the quintessential Deliverance fan (hey I saw them in 1989 on the Victory tour [that's in support of their first self titled CD] but I had to drive 6 hours to a tiny club, paid $10.00 and there was no other band that night, and still rank it in my top 5 shows ever!) and still I don't see this CD getting much play time. The quality is as stated simply terrible, but I now know there are some really good speed/thrash D tunes out there that never made it to CD, like 'Fortress' and 'Hold On Tightly.' There is an interesting track that has the band dealing with a heckler back in their early days. You get new versions of; No Time, Deliverance, Attack, A Space Called You (only ever released on California Metal) J.I.G. and Temporary Insanity, the last couple are interesting cause the guitars have almost a Betrayal sound to them.

Anyway here's a CD for the TRUE diehard (no Crucified pun intended) early Deliverance fan. It's definitely worth checking out but I'm not exactly sure it's worth the $15.00 price tag due to the low, low quality of it, available through M8 Dist.

4.5/10