Death

***Five years after the second life of DEATH was started with the release of their revelatory 1976 album, For the Whole World to See, Death III slams the door on the vault with a powerful set of songs that bring equal amounts of rock and ethereal soul-searching, in high-fidelity, rich bottomed, studio-grade sound. Alongside songs from 1975, 1976 and 1980, Death III contains two songs from 1992, as the HACKNEY brothers reconvened nearly a decade after they’d stopped playing together. Death III serves as a companion piece of sorts to the A Band Called Death documentary, tracking the band’s movement from spiritual young rockers to older and wiser, bruised-but-undefeated brothers, in pure musical terms. David Hackney’s visual representation of Death was a triangle, where “spiritual,” “mental” and “physical” formed the three angles. With this in mind, For the Whole World to See is clearly the physical corner, with its undeniable proto-punk power; Spiritual–Mental–Physical explores the mental axis, with Death working through some of their influences—including The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and even ELO—in their practice space. Death III is the spiritual end of the portrait, bookended by the 
dreamlike rock visions of David Hackney that created and propelled the band called Death. (STREET DATE - 4/22/2014)