Dokken - Beast From The East album review

Rocken with Dokken – to the max

By Malcolm Dome
( Classic Rock )
published
Cover art for Dokken - Beast From The East album

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Beast From The East was the final album from the classic Dokken era, before the band split up in 1989. Recorded in Tokyo on the Back For The Attack tour the previous year, the band are in full flight as they storm through their best songs in a fervent performance.

This reissue is the entire gig restored, as opposed to other versions with a few songs missing, so in addition to the original tracklist you get Unchain The Night, Dream Warriors, In My Dreams and Breaking The Chains among many inspiring moments. It shows those four in the best possible light, with Don Dokken in great voice and George Lynch delivering some thunderous guitar.

There’s also the studio recording Walk Away, which underlines how Dokken still had a magic melodic touch. Add new and revealing sleeve notes, based on a interview with Don, and you’ve got a fine package of late-80s Dokken revelry.

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.