Draksen: The Album

A lot of people have asked for this so here it goes: the complete, remastered debut album from 1993. It was sad that our label at the time, Mix Records (a small, local, independent label) deemed that our material was not a "priority" to be released on the then "new" format (compact disc). This lead a lot of our followers to believe that we'd just done a better sounding demo with re-recorded versions of old demos and some new songs. The album took us about 2 months to finish because other Mix Records projects got in the way that were "priority".

We were originally signed to release 3 albums and, by the time we broke up, we had at least 6 songs finished or close to being finished for the second album.

Not only Mix Records had something to do with our demise. Timing, which is everything to a band, played a crucial role. By late 1993, alternative/grunge music was dominating the airwaves. Not that I hated it, mind you, in fact, I was all for it. Better that than the new Madonna, don't you think? Anyway, locally, it wasn't "grunge" that killed our "thrash". It was somenthing more "ironic": Death Metal. Even our ex-manager at the time told me that we needed to "downtune" our guitars and sound more "aggressive". Mmmm. I wonder if he ever truly listened to the album. It sounds pretty aggressive to me. Because of our technical sound and our tendency to do Metallica covers (as well as doing some Sepultura, Megadeth, Bad Religion & Nuclear Assault tunes), people thought we were going "soft". Mmm. Still, we managed to play with just about any hard sounding band, from SEDICION to CENOTAPH to peers TRANSMETAL.

After the break up, we lost contact with Mix Records, who folded a couple of years later. All we had were some copies of our album ON CASSETTE!!! Early in 2001 I did a digital transfer from my tape to mp3. It sounded ok, but with lots of hiss. Luckily, a couple of years later I managed to contact the guy who had the original DAT tape of the album. Unfortunately, DAT machines are hard to come by these days and it took me a while to find someone who had one and someone who could to a decent transfer.
After many unsuccessful attempts, in December 2008 I contacted Arturo "Tuti" Perales at OIGO Studios to do a transfer and a remastering. Tuti did our first demo, the one that got us the record deal, as well as bands such as CENOTAPH, GARIGOLES and AGONY LORDS.
Tuti did a great job but he could only do so much with the original sound. The people who recorded our album at Mix Records Studios were not too good at recording and mixing a thrash metal band, thus the sound was not entirely to our liking. Still, it was the tighest we've ever been as a band, so it was better than nothing.

We decided to re record songs from old demos as to give them an update. After all, tons of bands do that: Slayer, Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, etc. So why not us? "Thrashcore" ended up sounding really aggressive, a far cry from the cheap sounding "thrashcore" demo. "From Beyond" took on a whole new level and "I Want My Money Back" finally sounded proper. The new songs were obviously our favorites: "Bigger Than Life" was a sign of the more technical direction Draksen adopted when Alex Isaac, Tacho Torres and Fabian Medina came on board. It was one of the more difficult songs to record. "Improved Hatred" had a riff that was just as hard as a solo! It was played blazingly fast, a mixture of SADUS and WEHRMACHT, or so I think. "Subversive" was also one of the newer songs and it had many time changes.
The original album missed one track, "Uncertainty" which is restored to the complete album. I had my reservations with the way I sang the song. It became a live favorite despite being the most radically different Draksen song. It was our, dare I say, "grunge" song! Still, for a "grunge" song, it had plenty of solos, double bass, palm muting and time changes. This was the song that Mix Records liked the most and were interested in us exploring this side on the next album. In the end, it was decided to include the song on the next album, which would've been half thrash, half this type of song.

I hope you guys enjoy the album. It is compressed in high quality mp3 (160 kbps) and perfectly tagged. Just drag and drop into iTunes or whatever program you have to administrate songs. Let me know what you think of it and for those old school fans, I'll be uploading the "From Beyond" demo in January 2010. Stay in touch!

Download!

http://www.mediafire.com/?zr4hjjknjom