Raider - Trial by Chaos

Quantum Thrash

I wish I liked Raider so much more than I actually do.  I wanted to frontload this review with praise because basically every single component involved in Trial by Chaos is individually fantastic.  The riffs are razor sharp and superlative in both quantity and quality, the pace is breakneck on a level of classic releases by the most insane bands in the genre like Sodom, Sepultura, and Sadus, the vocals are primarily an unbelievably venomous snarl, the album is cohesively destructive, every single thing I like about thrash is present in abundance and the quality thereof is immense.

So why have I knocked back like eight straight listens of this album and still can't remember literally anything except the choruses in "New Dominion" and "Labyrinth"?  My instinct is to argue that they're the only two moments where the guitars let their foot off the gas and let the brutality wash over like a wave of sarin gas as opposed to forty bazooka shells per second, but I'm willing to bet I'd find more moments like that on subsequent listens.  Those moments of genuine hooks are likely there elsewhere but I'm still functionally reviewing blind despite spending literal hours with Trial by Chaos.  

This may be an odd comparison since there's an extremely high chance that the entire metal listening populace has completely forgotten about this band over the last decade, but the band this actually reminds me of most is Battlecross.  There was this period of time in the early tens when they were undergoing a pretty big push by Metal Blade and found themselves all over the bigger metal media outlets.  I heard them constantly during the three month window where I had satellite radio, they played Mayhem Fest, their second and third albums were pushed and championed really hard, I had no shortage of opportunities to hear them and soak in their absolutely vicious brand of thrash, injected with enough brutality to earn them the death/thrash moniker and enough melody to see them erroneously pegged as metalcore because 2012 was a very stupid time.  Their hallmark feature, however, was how wholly forgettable they were.  Every single song was the best fucking thing I'd ever heard and then within the course of a moderate-length toilet break I would forget they even existed.  They had this approach to thrash that consisted of throwing ten gazillion riffs at you in thirty minutes, all of which were good on their own, but when smashed together it just became a total blur of percussive noise that dissipated within seconds.  I know I've made this exact comparison for this exact reason in it least two or three other reviews and, hilariously, I can't remember which ones.  There are certainly more temporally relevant examples than Battlecross and yet I keep reaching back to them because they're the only example of this phenomenon whose name I've been able to remember.  I want to be pretentious and give it its own genre, "quantum thrash" or something along those lines.  Something that only exists during the exact moments I'm engaging with it.

That's the liminal space where Raider resides.  It's a huge shame because, and I can't state this enough, all of the components are there.  A few members are also in Cathartic Demise, a band with a similar style that I really enjoy, but it seems like scaling back the more overtly melodic moments of that band and giving them an in-your-face wall of sound production turns all of those excellent riffs into a faceless morass of intensity.  The moments that do stand out are all the brief moments where they break from this overwhelming and arduous aural assault.  Those octave patterns that hold while the drums and vocals pound away in "Labyrinth" stand out partially because they're the only notes on the entire god damned album longer than a quarter note, and because it gives the music some melodic subtlety while allowing the vocals to rip out one of the only actual hooks on the album.  It genuinely reminds me of Arsis at their best, that bit is straight out of "The Cold Resistance".  "Juggernaut Cerebrivore" stands out entirely for the first minute featuring haunting clean guitars that build to a sincerely explosive release.  It's one of the starkly few times the album the album isn't brickwalling you to death and the only moment that reminds me of a band whose entire appeal isn't all-intensity-all-the-time, that being Metallica in this case.  Every other moment edges much closer to the more ferocious acts from thrash's heyday like Demolition Hammer or Morbid Saint.  Those bands both rule, as does every other name I've dropped so far, but they all have actual hooks and memorable moments to complement their relentless savagery.  Raider has savagery in abundance with so few memorable moments that, without scrolling up to check, I seriously can't remember which two songs I highlighted in the second paragraph because I'm pretty sure "Juggernaut Cerebrivore" wasn't one of them.

Maybe this is a me problem.  I'm cognizant enough to recognize that I like all of the elements at play, and maybe this album simply isn't one that instantly hooks you and instead reveals its tricks over time.  As I get older, I find myself with less and less time to spend with albums that I need to "learn" to enjoy.  Maybe this makes me a dummy that requires instant gratification, maybe I just accidentally discovered why oldnoobs who only listen to bands they loved as teenagers and convince themselves that every new mediocre nothingburger is actually another masterpiece exist in the first place, maybe I'm just not in the right headspace for this kind of music right now and I would've reacted much differently if my first listen happened a month from now, who the fuck knows?  At the same time, I am the target audience for this, I do enjoy plenty of bands with a similar ethos, including bands that share members (Cathartic Demise) and inhabit the same scene (Invicta, Detherous), so there's something here that just isn't working.  Is it unfair to say an album is kinda mediocre and ultimately skippable despite enjoying all of the elements at play and not being able to explain why beyond vaguely gesturing at a memory hole?

Prolly.

RATING: 58%