Album Reviews

[Von Halen]

Review. Slash World On Fire. If you like Slash buy it. Good tunes. Maybe a little long.

It is long, but I like how some of the songs are short. Kind of like the old VH albums. Grab you. Rip your face off. Done.

[78/84 guy]

True. I ran through it a few times. Good stuff.

[DLR Bridge]

I actually listened to the first Slash CD, It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere, in it's entirety for the first time in along while at work the other day. It occurred to me that, even though it was recorded in '95, it actually serves as a much better follow to Appetite than those abysmal Illusion CDs with Axhole.

[78/84 guy]

The 2nd Snakepit record was even better if you ask me. Had more balls too it. This stuff with Myles is really good but Slash got away from the gritty songwriting. I like it all. He has one hell of a music library at this point. Unlike his former singer/partner Axhole.

[binnie]

The 2nd Snakepit record was even better if you ask me. Had more balls too it. This stuff with Myles is really good but Slash got away from the gritty songwriting. I like it all. He has one hell of a music library at this point. Unlike his former singer/partner Axhole.

Indeed. I reviewed the 2nd Snakepit record - 'Ain't Life Grand' - on page 4 of this thread. You'll see that I think it is one of the great unheralded rock records, and the second best thing Slash has ever played on.

I WILL review the new Slash record. I'm snowed under with work at the moment, so I'm a bit slower than normal. I think Slash's first solo CD (with the different singers) was good, the second one ('Apocalyptic Love') was only OK. It felt a little tepid in places to these ears.

[DLR Bridge]

I'm snowed under with work at the moment, so I'm a bit slower than normal. I think Slash's first solo CD (with the different singers) was good...

Hey bin, when you shovel your way out, see if you can check out the self titled CD by the band Imperial Drag from '95 or '96. It features some amazing vocals by Eric Dover, who was the main singer on 5 O' Clock. His guitar playing ain't too shabby, either.

[Von Halen]

Sesh, I think we're paying Binnie too much. He seems to be getting fat and lazy.

[binnie]

Thrash Back!

Ok, so we all know the Thrash Classics, the 'Master Of Puppets', Reign in Bloods' and 'Rust In Piece's' of the world. Some of us may even familiar with Exodus's 'Bonded By Blood', Testaments 'New Order', Kreator's 'Pleasure Of Kill' and Celtic Frost's 'To Mega Therion'. But these twelve Thrash records are from the less heralded corners of the metal world. Records that kill but never got the recognition.

I recommend that you work your necks in!

[binnie]

Thrash Back: Dark Angel – Darkness Descends (1986)

1986 saw the release of four pinnacle Thrash releases. Three of them – Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’, Megadeth’s ‘Peace Sells….but Who’s Buying?’ and Metallica’s ‘Master Of Puppets’ – you’ve heard of. The fourth – Dark Angel’s ‘Darkness Descends’ – you probably haven’t, but it can stand and trade with any of them. This was a record of sweaty, frenzied fury, relentless in its pursuit of relentlessness as each track sought to outdo the previous in its channelling of unbridled anger. Even at the height of Thrash metal, this was unbelievably fast and ridiculously heavy. But what separated Dark Angel from the pack was that their bile-black savagery was balanced with compositional poise and incredible playing (especially from drummer, Gene ‘The Atomic Clock’ Hoglan). In the hands of producer Randy Burns (who would go on to be a Death Metal producer-extraordinaire) this album didn’t just sound raw, it sounded wounded.

The title-track is colossal, an apocalypse of hardcore and Slayer riffs that still makes you wince three decades on. ‘The Burning of Sodom’ is warp-speed and possesses a demented level of fury far beyond anything the ‘Big Four’ could muster – here was a song which bridged the gap between ‘Thrash Metal’ and ‘Death Metal’ before the latter termed had being coined properly. And the power just keeps coming and coming. ‘Perish In Flames’ is a vortex of anger, whilst ‘Hunger Of The Undead’ features some of the most vicious, muscular riffs every committed to music, the perfect vehicle for Eric Meyer and Jim Durkin’s nasty, malicious guitar tones. There is zero filler – not even a part of a song, or a riff, was allowed to pass under the grade. Is it naïve in places? Certainly, but that was part of Thrash’s DIY charm. Some lyrics are typically ghoulish, but elsewhere (‘Death Is Certain (Life If Not)’) the band branched out into novel territories (a theme which continued on later releases).

It is hard to conceive of music heavier than ‘Darkness Descends’. This is an album to punch walls to. An album of pure cathartic, cleansing anger. In 1986 Dark Angel could live with anyone.

[binnie]

Thrash Back: Heathen - Evolution of Chaos (2010)

Heathen – Evolution of Chaos (2010)

A gentle, sitar led introduction and then BOOM. MOSH…MOSH…MOSH. BWAAAARGGGHHH……too….much….metal. When they take particles up to the speed of light in the Hadron Collider, it probably sounds a whole lot like this, the return of thrash pioneers Heathen. It’s an incredible – and incredibly heavy – record choked with neck wrenching anthems and prog-metal sags. But it’s the chops that kill. David White sings his ass off here, and is one of the best guys in metal at laying vocals and melodies over music this fast. Axemen Lee Altus and Kragon Lam are one of metal’s best partnerships – delivering a battalion of crunch here, they also serve up solo after dazzling solo which drive these songs into the metal heavens. Always at the more technical end of thrash, fans will be relieved to learn that Heathen have managed to maintain the balance which prevents them from slipping into indolent showmanship.

Indeed what you get here are not so much songs as beast, rampant and savage. ‘Control By Chaos’ is a serious of punchy almost Prong-like riffs at speed, 6 minutes of metallic heaven. ‘No Stone Unturned’ is a mid-paced battleaxe of a tune, an anthem which evolves into a progressive thrash-a-thon workout – shit, Metallica used to deliver stuff like this. ‘Arrows of Agony’ and ‘Fade Away’ are hook-heavy anthems, whilst the furious ‘Dying Season’ deserves to be hailed as a classic. If only more people could hear it. MOSH…..MOSH…BWWARRRRGHHHHHHH….FUCK…..MY… NECK…..HURTS.

The flipside is that there’s almost too much metal here – these songs are very long, often overwhelming, and reward repeated and persistent listening. But it’s worth it. This record is better than some many other ‘reunion’ thrash albums. Better than anything which bigger hitters like Kreator, Forbidden or Exodus have produced, and in many ways its as good as some of Megadeth’s latter records (put a gun to my head and I might say better). Why? Because its not a throwback – Heathen have taken all the ingredients of the classic sound and updated them for the modern palate.

[binnie]

Sesh, I think we're paying Binnie too much. He seems to be getting fat and lazy.

So, I guess that's my way of saying: blow me.

[Seshmeister]

So, I guess that's my way of saying: blow me.

Why are you reviewing these pointless fringe thrash albums when Slash is doing a major world tour at the moment?

[binnie]

Thrash Back: Coroner – No More Color (1989)

Album number 3 from Swiss thrashers Coroner is love at first listen. In 1989 Thrash was on the cusp of eschewing the primal fury of its original wave in favour a more technical, increasingly progressive, style of heaviness. Annihilator and Megadeth are usually the two bands deemed pivotal to this shift – and thus to allowing Thrash to open metal up in important new directions – but in truth ‘No More Color’ predates those band’s pivotal records (‘Alice In Hell’ and ‘Rust In Peace’). It is also superior to both.

The key to its power is the guitar of Tommy T. Baron. Put simply, there are some absolutely dazzling riffs here, and some playing that wails with the best of them.
‘Die By My Hand’ welds the muscularity of Metallica to the intricacy of Megadeth and is quite simply one of the heaviest songs you’ve never heard. ‘No Need To Be Human’ makes some eerie premonitions of Gojira’s angular heaviness, a maelstrom of dark and sinewy riffs which crushes with mid-paced power and balances beauty and the beast in true Metallica style. ‘D.O.A’ features an incisor riff and melodic finesse, and also demonstrates an aspect of Coroner which separated them from the Thrash pack: the lyrics. Far more than the usual ‘death/ doom/ destruction’ themes, here we witness a band exploring more adult and real topics in a way which is never clumsy. ‘Tunnel Of Pain’ is unrelentingly heavy – a testament to the fact that metal was heavier in the ‘80s than it’s been at any time since – and ‘Read My Scars’ combines dazzling technical playing with a chorus worthy of a stadium. That it hangs together so well testifies to this band’s songwriting prowess.

Indeed, complexity and aggression rarely make good bedfellows. ‘No More Color’, however, sees them fucking like nymphomaniac rabbits who’ve just been informed that the apocalypse is imminent. For the listener, this is somewhat disconcerting – you’re compelled to sit back and listener in awe, but also to headbang with pure abandon. But what truly makes this remarkable is that whereas most Thrash albums became an exercise in maniacal speed for its own sake, her was a band doing more than hypnotic palm-muted riffage. In the hands of producer Scott Burns – who would go on to be an uber Death Metal knob twidler – the crunch of this metallic feast is prominent and raw and loses none of its crisp complexity.

Depth with immediacy; darkness with good, not-so-friendly violent fun, and progression without pretentiousness, Coroner were a truly remarkable band. In 1989, the metal world was going ga-ga from Sepultura as the ‘saviours’ of Thrash. Few could deny the primitive bludgeon of Brazil’s favourite sons, but that far, far more inventive bands like Coroner are over-looked is a damn shame.

[binnie]

Sodom - Agent Orange (1989)

From the vaults: Sodom – Agent Orange (1989)

Thrash was – originally, at least – an American form of metal, perhaps the point at which the US took over the ‘Heavy Metal’ mantle formulated by the UK in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We all know that the ‘Big 4’ of thrash (and some of their ‘smaller’ peers) delivered some genre-changing, life-fulfilling ode-to-the-riff packed albums in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. But what is often overlooked is that fact that Germany’s ‘Big Three’ (Sodom, Kreator and Destruction) served up their fair share of metallic goodness, too. If the debate regarding ‘best album’ for the Big 4 falls roundly between ‘Master Of Puppets’ and ‘Reign In Blood’ (it’s the former, by the way), for the ‘Big Three’ it comes down to Kreator’s delightfully evil ‘Pleasure To Kill’ and ‘Agent Orange’, the third album from Sodom. Most would opt for Kreator, a band who served up something heavier than just about anything conceivable in 1986. But for my money, ‘Agent Orange’ is the superior record – certainly not as fast, or as rabid, but the maturity of song-writing and delivery here makes for a record which is truly crushing in its hyper-fast Teutonic march and relentlessly tight. The German bands were always more brutal, and this is no exception. But ‘Agent Orange’ combined that organic savagery with the complexity of what the ‘Big 4’ were doing, and tempered it in places with some Celtic Frost style atmospherics. Far from gun-metal grey, the result is a band which paints in many shades of heaviness. The cement-mixer bass is high in the mix; the blood-curdling vocals are downright mean; Chris Witchhunter (RIP) hits the drums like an angry gorilla; and Frankie Blackfire’s riffs are utterly, utterly savage.

This album was light-years ahead of the band’s debut ‘Persecution Mania’ in terms of focus and precision. The title-track serves up pulverising riff after pulverising riff on a bedrock of Slayer-esque time-changes to amp up the energy. This is aggression of mesmerizing proportions, the sort of heaviness that owns you, and which has rarely been matched since. Quite how Tom Angelripper’s bark manages to chisel its way through the mountainface of metal is beyond me. Like all classic records, ‘Agent Orange’ combines variety with a unity of theme and purpose. Thus the mid-paced stomper ‘Remember The Fallen’ is distinct from the punk fury of ‘Incest’ (the nastiest song ever written?) but yet not apart from it or the greasy evilness of the Motorhead-esque ‘Ausgebombt’. ‘Magic Dragon’ features 3 or 4 riffs which most band’s spend a life-time never being able to match and builds and builds its power through a machine-gun like delivery of spitting rage and is outdone in the ‘my fucking neck hurts’ stakes only by ‘Tired & Red’, an epic which spans from punk to Maiden via a melodic interlude. Like a Metallica epic, it’s true beauty and the beast stuff. Sodom would certainly become better musicians in future years; and they would also become more comfortable with the concept of melody. But even as good as their records in the ‘00s have been, they’ve never come close to the sheer other-worldly vibrancy and vitality of ‘Agent Orange’.

What makes ‘Agent Orange’ such a joy almost a quarter of a century on is the unbridled fury it exhibits. The sound here is ‘Kill ‘em All’ raw, a hypnotic crunch of metal on metal guitars recorded on a small budget and capturing a certain type of power which bigger productions don’t possess. Easily a top 10 all-time thrash classic, this is a record which should be hailed in the same way as anything produced by Sodom’s American peers, a purchased by the same hairy teenage palms that lap up ‘Hell Awaits’ with such glee. Few records capture a time so aptly without becoming limited to it, but ‘Agent Orange’ is certainly one of them.

[binnie]

Thrash back: Dew Scented - Icarus (2012)

Dew Scented – Icarus

‘Dew Scented’ are – no arguments please – the most inaccurately named band ever: given the sheer unbridled ferocity of their brand of thrash, ‘Crack Pitbull’ would be far, far more appropriate! Scrabbling around to conjure suitable adjectives to describe the intensity of this metal, terms like ‘brutal’, ‘savage’, ‘rampant’ or ‘furious’ seem woefully inadequate. ‘Maniacal’ is how this sounds. That is not to say that the music is particularly extreme – this is post-Haunted thrash metal which steers well clear of death, black or more angular aspects of the genre. What we get, then, is ultra-aggression in palatable forms and, crucially, delivered in some of the best songs your ears will have heard for years. Up to this point Dew Scented have been competent and commendable rather than classic – with ‘Icarus’, they just stepped into the big leagues. Just when you thought that a genre of music was becoming over-saturated, someone delivers an album as special as this.

Fucking hell it’s good. ‘Sworn To Obey’ is a bristling burst of warp-factor fury; ‘Thrown To The Lions’ is built from a series of tasty riffs, tempo-changes and licks good enough to leap into the ‘A’ league; ‘Storm Within’ sounds like modern-day Slayer, a skull-fucker riff and demonic melody working in sync to inject a double-dose of heaviness; whilst ‘A Final Procession’ features a riff that could slip discs – Marvin Vriesde is a Heavy Metal beast. Lyrically, it all sticks to the ‘3 Ds of Thrash’: Death, Destruction and Defiance – sure, you’ve heard it all before, but it fits the bill perfectly and often comes in the form of some interesting and thoughtful wording. When you have artwork as cool as this – a sort of post-apocalyptic take on the ‘Icarus’ story – that has to be the case.

But what really makes this album work is the emphasis on the whole over the individual parts. The songs are all – refreshingly – under 5 minutes. There is little in the way of flash, no self-indulgence or anything to lessen the whole. Delivered in a production which is very ‘live’ in its feel, Dew Scented neatly side-step the trend of most newer thrash bands to pursue the ‘technical’ route, which is often a short-route to sterility. Not so here: the sound is raw, buoyant, bottom-heavy and bristling with energy. The Haunted should take note, because these Germans have taken their template far beyond the level that they have reached in recent years. Put simply, ‘Icarus’ deserves to become a familiar part of metal’s landscape – if you were to compile a list of ‘The Best Thrash Records since “The Haunted Made Me Do It”’ this would be right near the top.

Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to do something exciting with it.