These legendary thrashers have descended into the Pacific Northwest to show-off their first new album in 34 years!
It’s time to visit the Rickshaw Theatre in Vancouver Canada tonight to further my ongoing education in metal. Tonight, metal pioneers Dark Angel, along with Vio-lence, Midnight and Interceptor are in town to bring the metal forces back together. I say back together as there hasn’t been a lot of shows of this magnitude since perhaps May with the Modified Ghost Festival. It was definitely nice to see all the familiar faces in the crowd back, and tonight we have a lot of the older guards of metal attending seeing this band for perhaps the first time.
Dark Angel initially formed back in 1981, yes, 44 years ago. Many breakups, bad decisions and lost members over the years but have been resurrected by drummer Gene Hoglan. Gene is not considered a founding member since day 1 but he did start since 1984, along with guitarist Eric Meyer (1984), bassist Mike Gonzalez, and Rob Rinehart on vocals. The other founding member, Jim Durkin, passed away in March of 2023 which left a spot open for Laura Christine to permanently take over as guitarist. Laura is also Gene Hoglan’s wife. Gene, back with the dark signature glasses and alot thinnner, and, as we all know, is one of the top metal drummers in the world. Known as the “Atomic Clock”, we have seen him recently in Vancouver with other bands like Dethklok, Testament (no longer with) and Death to Us All (Death tribute band).
They have 5 albums in the discography, with Darkness Descends being perhaps having material that they are most known for. After 34 years since 1991’s Time Does Not Heal album, they finally released a new on called Extinction Level Event, which was released just recently on September 5 2025. They were recently in Vancouver back in 2023 at the Rickshaw Theatre.
Tonight, they hit the stage at 9:25pm with one from 1991’s “Time Does Not Heal”. It’s a real thrasher of a song to start the night, as next on to “The Burning of Sodom” from Darkness Descends. That got the pit moving, and bodies are floating over the wall to the front. Next was “No One Answers” from 1989’s Leave Scars album, and here we got a good look at Laura doing some solo work with technical prowess, and proved she definitely is no slouch on that red flying V of hers.
Thrash has always been a meat and potatoes genre with no real glitzy stage or extravagant clothing. It’s more about the music than the ‘look’ and this is what it was like in the 80’s with basically a drummer on the drum riser and a big banner in the background. The sound for me was just ok, the guitar mix seemed a little mushy to me, but overall good as they rage into “Extinction Level Event” from the new album. Definitely a different sound but doesn’t stray far from their thrash roots at all and comes off better live than on the album.
They would play 3 others from that new album, with “Apex Predator”, “Sea of Heads” and “Woke Up to Blood”. Of the rather short 12 song set, all 5 albums are touched, with most of the attention on Darkness Descends (4) and Extinction Level Event (4) .
Interesting speech prior to the second last song with “Darkness Descends” when vocalist Rinehart says “we are not going to make you chant 1 more song, we don’t do that! We look at this as if we are stepping into the freakin Octogon”. How refreshing! Someone that thinks like I do about encores and not make the fans beg for more. I just wonder if they played 17-18 songs like many headliners do, that they might think differently after that 12th song for a break. My only gripe about this show was the lack of fans that showed up on a Friday night to see these legends! Where are the 20000 Metallica fans? All I know is that there were approximately 400 hardcore Vancouver thrash fans that know their roots at the Rickshaw tonight. It wasn’t due to a lack of quality support bands either with Interceptor, Midnight and veteran bay area thrashers Vio-lence. Least I digress here, all the bands put their hearts and souls into this great show and Vancouver missed some incredible performances. Go see these bands! They won’t be around forever!
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