RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol IV: Trivium - Ascendancy

I'm not making the boat rudder joke
 

I've recently learned about the theory that the kind of music you hate the most tends to actually be superficially similar to the kind you love the most.  Your natural assumption would be that somebody's least favorite style of music is the one the most opposite to their favorite, but ask any outlaw country fan what they think of Florida Georgia Line, or any jazz fan what they think of Kenny G's schlock.  Most pertinent to this series, ask any underground metalhead in 2005 what the worst genre was and they'd probably say metalcore.  The idea is that this is due to a sort of "musical uncanny valley", where you hate what you hate the most because it's almost something you love, but something about it is just too off, too artificial, too wrong to truly be what it is you love, and that gives us a sort of fight-or-flight reaction of visceral disgust.  I've been thinking about this a lot as I explore these metalcore bands for this series, and I think Trivium here is the poster child for metal's uncanny valley.  I know I spend a lot of time harping on how metalloids are obsessed with aesthetics and reflexively reject bands that don't look the part, and I still think that's true to an extent, but this way of thinking has really helped me to understand why this entire scene got shat on by the underground for so long, and Trivium in particular got it real bad.  They were an internet punching bag for years and I didn't even really question it.  Of course they sucked, I mean come on, have you listened to them?

 

I didn't start this series with the intention of pointing at maligned releases and just saying "Thing Good, Actually", but it was inevitable that it would happen at least once and I'm just as surprised as you are that Trivium wound up being the lucky winner.

The reason I think Trivium hit that musical uncanny valley more than any of their peers is because holy shit I never realized how 80s these songs are.  Seriously!  There are loads of things for classic metal fans to enjoy here, mostly in the absolute heaps of influence they took from Metallica and Iron Maiden.  The Crusade is obviously their "We're thrash now for real please respect us" album, but Ascendancy is the one I remember being their breakthrough and the one that started all the backlash, and I can see why people had that reaction to it.  Sure there are tons of dueling solos and harmonized melodies and bona fide thrash riffs, but there is enough that's just left-of-center enough to feel inauthentic.  Something simple is the fact that the album is played in Drop D tuning.  For the non musicians, all you really need to know is that dropped tunings simply aren't the approach that most bands take if they're aiming for the sound Trivium was aiming for here.  That's more the domain of grunge, nu metal, and, well, metalcore.  It's very easy to get huge sounding powerchords that jump around the neck with that top string down a step and it's conducive to writing big fuckin' breakdowns and really fast chug riffs (both of which this album doesn't necessarily shy away from, in fairness).  Hearing somebody take that tuning and basically rewrite "Trapped Under Ice" with it just feels different, and even if you don't know or understand all that, your brain picks up on it.  The tuning isn't the be-all-end-all wrong part, but it's one element of several that divorces Ascendancy from its roots just enough to feel like some sort of forgery.

But honestly, it's not really an impostor because the music is surprisingly legit.  That opening attack of "Rain" is absolutely devastating, "Drowned and Torn Asunder" is genuinely just thrash metal with a beefier low end, "Declaration" sounds like a squadron of machine guns, "A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation" has a main riff that sports an incredibly infectious hook and transitions into some of the most Maiden melodies that Maiden never wrote.  Everywhere I look there's something else I enjoy.  My memory told me this had very pedestrian drumming but it's actually mega energetic, and the solos are some of the best the genre ever produced.  The sound is great, the songs generally smash (though of course the more melodic ballady songs like "Departure" and "Dying in Your Arms" are incredibly boring and throw a monkey wrench in the album's momentum), hell even the common problem of bands strictly adhering to pop song structures isn't as obvious or irritating this time, even though they pump out a lot of standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus songs regardless.  There's enough variety in approach that it doesn't get nearly as tiring as it did with Killswitch.  The cliches are still here of course, the choruses are almost uniformly cleanly sung and the most intense part of any given song is the first fifteen seconds, but it feels less dogmatic and more loose here.

However there's an elephant in the room here.  I haven't brought up the vocals yet, and that's because "Beefy" Matt Heafy has the absolute worst scream in the scene.  His harsh vocals are unbearably inept, to the point where they genuinely hinder my enjoyment to a surprising degree.  His cleans are fine, unremarkable but serviceable, but his harsh vocals are leagues below anybody else I've heard so far.  They're very hoarse and scratchy, like somebody running their nails down drywall.  He sounds like he was moderately thirsty but decided to track every single song in one long take before getting a glass of water.  I like to imagine his clean voice is his only real voice, and the screams are just the result of something like that Finnish cough drop commercial where the black metal guy takes a lozenge and then starts singing like Pavarotti.  That bit at the end of the second verse of "Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr" where he goes "I'LL BURN YOUR WOLLL" sounds drier than Ben Shapiro's wife.  More than anything, Trivium needed to tell Heafy to just stick to guitar while they hired a real vocalist, because he's pretty good at guitar and unbelievably bad at vocals.  I know Trivium is still releasing new albums to this day and I hope to god he's either improved or dropped them entirely to focus on clean singing, because god damn I can not stress enough how awful they are.  Imagine starting a thrash band and then letting some kid who has never screamed before but was into Terror last summer handle the vocals, because that's not too far off from what we got here.

It's such a shame that the vocals are as bad as they are, because they're really the only element of the album that I actually think sucks.  On an instrumental level Ascendancy sits somewhere in the high 70s/low 80s range; not great but it's consistently quite good.  But those screams are so prominent and so bad that they seriously shave off like twenty fuckin' percent off the final score for me.  Running classic non-extreme metal through a filter of modern melodeath that makes it both heavier and catchier should be easy as hell to do, but the vocal choices they made here just amount to a stake through the heart.

RATING: 62%

Testament - Titans of Creation

Final Fatassy

Bear with me, I need to compare something to Final Fantasy again.  I know, I know, it's kinda my thing.  Blame the fact that Vivi was the closest thing I had to a real friend growing up.

Once upon a time, Final Fantasy became the videogame institution that it became because the series used to pump out excellence at an alarming rate.  Over the years, Squeenix has completely lost the ability to tell a great story (once their greatest strength).  The games were and still are absolutely fucking gorgeous, with every release pushing the hardware of its home console to the limit, with slick presentation and heartbreakingly beautiful cinematics.  But the actual heart, the stories they tell, the white hot burning core of the entire role playing genre, has been utter fucking trash for decades, and despite how different they all are they somehow manage to have similar problems.  Very often, the stories devolve into incoherent multiverse nonsense (also very prevalent in Kingdom Hearts, because some Brain Genius decided Tetsuya Nomura's only skill of drawing tiny torsos and a fuckload of belts would somehow translate to a creative role and for some utterly unfathomable fucking reason they keep letting him direct shit) with annoying characters and nearly identical villains.  There are elements that succeed here and there by what I can only assume is divine flukery, but the overall trajectory has been safely rehashing the same ideas that barely worked the first time for years now.

That's what modern Testament is to me.  There is absolutely no denying that their presentation is on point.  Ever since their resurgence on Nuclear Blast with The Formation of Damnation in 2008, each album has been graced with a stunning piece of Eliran Kantor artwork, the production on every album has had instantly recognizable combo of sheen and punch that Andy Sneap always delivers, Chuck Billy's gruff, howling holler remains one of the most iconic voices in thrash metal, I maintain that to this day they are still worth catching live because their energy is unreal at their currently advanced age, and the lineup is basically the stuff of dreams nowadays since Alex Skolnick returned and the rhythm section has been stocked with the twin Jeff Garcias of the metal world in Steve DiGiorgio and Gene Hoglan (the two best journeymen support players in the whole damn macrogenre).

And yet, when the fuck is the last time Testament wrote a truly phenomenal song?  When is the last time they delivered a riff that truly blew your socks off?  When is the last time they crafted something as instantly catchy as "Souls of Black" or "Over the Wall"?  Hell I actually like The Formation of Damnation but there's no denying that nothing on there holds a candle to what they pumped out on The New Order.  Every single album in the Nuclear Blast era has had unbelievably slick presentation but no matter what new thing they try, they completely fail to deliver on the most important component, genuinely great riffs and songs.  Titans of Creation only follows this pattern, with another breathtaking Kantor piece, another pristine Sneap knobjob, another great Billy performance, and another way-too-long album with precisely zero great riffs.  Who the fuck heard "Symptoms" or "The Healers" and decided they absolutely needed to be included?

The soul-deflating hour long runtime is an unsurprising problem, since albums dragging on for too long is a common complaint of mine, but it really hurts here because so little of interest happens despite the consistently high tempo.  Hoglan's drumming seems to have lost all creativity, never once showing off his famous speed or lightning fast fills, instead falling into a comfortable metronomic performance that could have been (and probably was) recorded in his sleep, and DiGiorgio's famous fretless bass wizardry is a completely misused waste of talent on par with Jeff Loomis joining Arch Enemy.  Peterson and Skolnick's guitar mastery is relegated to stock thrash riffs pulled out of a dusty trunk and their once phenomenal leadwork sounds like nothing but meaningless noise.  Testament's classic era was never as extreme as their contemporaries but they still stood out on the strength of excellent songwriting and a knack for maddeningly good hooks, but they seemed to have lost this ability somewhere around six or seven songs into 2008.  The only truly catchy song this time around is "Dream Deceiver", and the intensity is at least worthwhile on "Night of the Witch" and "Curse of Osiris", but those are three minor successes on an otherwise uninteresting album at the tail end of a career that has been unimpressive for years now.

I know it's kind of a meaningless critique to just call something uninteresting since it's hard to put mediocrity into words, but that's really the main problem here.  Titans of Creation is less than the sum of its parts by a pretty wide margin.  The few moments when Peterson gets to inject his love of the more extreme fringes of metal are pretty solid ("Curse of Osiris" is far and away the best track on the album for this exact reason), but meandering riff salads like "WWIII", "Code of Hammurabi", and "City of Angels" make up the lion's share of the album and I can't recommend listening to it in good faith.  Like, it's cool that the band's vocals have diversified so much in recent years (Peterson's more extreme snarl is showcased well in "Night of the Witch") but they don't amount to anything meaningful when surrounded by more pedestrian riffs than a musical crosswalk.  This is a step up from the insulting lameness of Brotherhood of the Snake but not by much.  Titans of Creation is another safe and mediocre entry into Testament's late-career resurgence, and just like the hamfisted comparison from the intro, even the new ideas are wrong in the same way as the old ideas and the actual heart of the band has been diminished to a shriveled lump of barely-beating nothing.

There's really no place to put this, but I have to give a round of applause to "Catacombs" for being so clearly intended as an instrumental intro track but somehow winding up lost in the caboose as the last song on the album.


RATING: 40%

Concrete Funeral - Ultimum Judicium

STAB-STAB-STABBED

Thrash is an artistic dead end, we all know that, that isn't a hot take by any means.  All of the best thrash riffs have already been written (90% of them were written by Slayer at that), so if you're going to plant yourself firmly as a "thrash band" without veering into too much outside influence, the only way to really stand out nowadays is by just being as frantic and intense as possible.  And in that regard, the lads from the Texas of Canada excel in that regard.

Concrete Funeral is a new band, made up almost entirely of fresh faces in the scene, and if it weren't for vocalist Devin Schrum, they'd probably be completely pointless.  Musically there's nothing wrong with this, but if they had any average thrash vocalist they'd be just another rando in a scene that's both overcrowded and clearly dying.  They play extraordinarily heavy thrash in the vein of newer Testament or Sodom with drums that are ten times louder than usual, and they keep the pace as high as they can as a general rule.  So really there's nothing much that makes this stand out on its own, but it's quite competent and a fun listen every once in a while.

But like I said, they have the X factor with Schrum's vocals.  I don't know if I've really made it clear before or not, but I absolutely fucking adore when thrash employs vocals that sound almost inhuman in their venomousness.  More or less the only thing that keeps me from completely writing off Havok nowadays is just how completely manic and insane David Sanchez's vocals have gotten over the years, and Schrum hits basically that exact same plane of complete insanity with his voice.  He utilizes some absolutely savage lows, recalling some of the more beastly ideals of out-and-out death/thrash like The Crown, but his true ace in the hole is his mid/high range voice.  He sounds fucking feral, like he's biting his own throat out of his neck and vomiting it directly onto your face.  The sheer vicious acidity of the vocals absolutely knock the album a full several pegs above where it would sit with a more generic vocalist and add so much to the latent intensity of the riffs themselves.

Unfortunately, while the vocals do carry the album, they don't make the album completely amazing on their own.  Musically this is a very "ok" album, hitting all of the thrash tropes in the exact order you'd expect to hear them, and no amount of flashy solos or double bass can really break this out of the hole it dug for itself by simply playing by the rules of thrash.  I've said before that we as fans of metal have unfairly moved the goalposts for thrash over the years, and I still believe that.  Something can play by the rules and still kick ass at it, and Ultimum Jucidium is a great example of that, because I do think this is a good album and definitely something worth listening to, but I'd be lying if I said the brazen lack of innovation wasn't a bit of a disappointment, and the fact that there are only three truly standout tracks and two of them are at the very end ("Drown", "Carnival of Contradictions", and "Stabbed to Death") is a also a bit of a bummer.  I'd say this isn't worth skipping by any means, and is definitely something I see myself coming back to as the year grinds on, but I don't see it ever truly breaking out and becoming a clear favorite on the year.


RATING: 77%

Terrific Verdict - Wheel of Fortune

zzzzzz

As much as I may dislike so many bands from the country, I think you'd be a fool to not put Finland just outside the top five most important countries when it comes to metal.  Yeah they have nothing on their Scandinavian neighbors, Germany, US, or the originators of the style as a whole, UK, but like... they're right there.  In terms of classic and innovative bands, who else besides those previous five are in the running?  Japan, Brazil, Canada, and...?  They may be a punchline at times for so utterly saturating their country with shitty corsetcore pop metal but that only really proliferated in the first place because they gave the world Nightwish, ya know?  They pretty much have three entirely different subsects of melodeath that all spawned out of there, depending on whether we're talking about the style pioneered by Children of Bodom, Insomnium, or Wintersun, and if we mention that last one we can't leave out Ensiferum being one of the biggest folk metal bands ever.  I haven't even touched on the more gothic stuff like Sentenced or whatever the fuck Amorphis is, or Reverend Bizarre with their very distinct brand of doom that also spawned legions of imitators.  And if that's all too melodic and lightweight for you, they also have huge quality scenes for the more extreme subgenres like black metal (Sargeist, Horna, Satanic Warmaster, etc) and death metal (Demigod, Adramelech, Convulse, and of course, Demilich) as well.

It seems like the one and only area where Finland has always lagged behind has been thrash metal, and if you wonder why, just give a listen to Terrific Verdict.

I'm not gonna lie, the intro is probably going to be longer than the actual review here because this is so fucking boring and dumb that I had to distract myself by thinking of a dozen other bands before even getting to this one.  At its core, Wheel of Fortune is just super basic bay-area styled thrash with nasally snarly vocals and precisely zero good riffs or hooks.  Terrific Verdict are victims of the recent nostalgia craze where every old band that existed in the 80s thinks they have a shot at recapturing any glory they missed out on in the pre-internet era, and once again we have another band that left no footprint whatsoever during their initial run (only producing two demos) and came roaring back as a bunch of dudes in their 40s or 50s trying their best to channel their youth and instead just sounding like the metal version of a washed up pub band. 

"Washed up" is really just the best way to describe how this sounds.  All of these riffs and ideas are just shriveled husks of what could've been a decent mid-tier thrash release 30 years ago but instead are just clearly past their prime now.  Like check out the first riff on "Too Late to Love or Hate".  There's nothing wrong with that on its own.  It's pretty basic, but it's quick and it moves well enough, but it just feels like it repeats a hundred times and then it turns out that almost every riff sounds like that one.  They basically have two riffs throughout the whole album, that one and the main one on the title track.  A fast one and a midpaced one, every fast and every midpaced riff sounds the more or less the same, and I just don't want to fucking listen to this boring, derivative, ultra-green shit anymore.  Even the handful of bonus tracks of rerecorded songs from the demo era are lame, and I'm sure they actually smoked back in 1988 but thirty years later they're just neutered and uninteresting.  Almost every song is like three minutes long and they all feel at least twice that just because they're so repetitive and bland.

Actually ya know what?  Fuck it, I've listened to this thing twice now and I don't want to sit through it any longer.  I'm just gonna cut this short and post it anyway because I want my headache to subside.

Metallica - Master of Puppets

HUNGRY BOB SEGER

I know, I know.  On the list of things the world needs right now, another fucking Master of Puppets review is pretty well near the bottom of the list.  But honestly, I just got a wild hair up my ass and I want to talk about Metallica.  Suck it up, nerds.

Metallica has somehow managed to survive no less than three or four extinction level career-enders throughout the years, and in many ways they're a constant punchline in the underground, for some valid reasons (the Napster lawsuit, St. Anger, the utter fucking absurdity of their reissues of classic albums), and some less valid (the Some Kind of Monster documentary, "selling out" with Load and cutting their hair in the 90s, whatever beautifully awful avant-garde disaster Lulu was), but I think it's easy to forget that once upon a time they were actually really god damned good.  Metallica ruled the fuckin' roost in the 80s, and I think it's easy to lose sight of just how big and impressive they were simply because we live in the internet age and can hear their more extreme contemporaries like Slayer or Dark Angel with a two second youtube search.  They were never the fastest or angriest or most brutal band in the world, but I think a big part of the charm is that they neither seemed to claim nor try to be.  They always just sorta did their own thing, helping to solidify what thrash metal was in the first place and then pretty much immediately breaking their own rules and doing weird shit like writing nine minute long instrumentals and punctuating blistering riff assaults with major-key doodly melodic shit.  They were never the only band doing these things, obviously, but they did have the biggest stage by the time the latter half of the decade rolled around and they leaned into what made them stand out.

To get one thing out of the way right off the bat, Master of Puppets is by no means their zenith, and in fact is actually an inferior 1:1 copy of it.  Ride the Lightning is better in almost every conceivable way.  The riffs are better, the songs are more well constructed, it has fucking "Creeping Death" on it, which was my favorite song in the world when I was a little kid and to this day I'd probably still put it in my top ten, it's just the superior record by almost every single metric.  The only areas where I'd say this album has the edge are the production (which is chunkier and heavier) and the vocals (which honestly just comes down to preference, I love the zit-faced voice-cracking exuberance of the first two albums but I'd give the edge to the slightly deeper and gruffer voice James starts sporting from here on out).  I know it's old hat to point out but the tracklist is ordered nearly identically as well, and it's something they'd stick to for basically the rest of their career.  Quiet intro leading into fast thrasher - title track (usually fast thrasher) - midpaced chuggy song - ballad - fast thrasher - midpaced melodic one - then usually the instrumental before closing on another fast thrasher (this was flipped on Ride but holds true on every other album that apes the formula).  Again, on a 1v1 comparison, Ride wins 7/8 times, with only "Leper Messiah" being clearly superior to "Escape".

But I'm not here to talk about how it's not as good as something else, I'm here to talk about how good it is on its own, and dammit it is good.  And it's good for kinda weird reasons at times.  One thing about the band in general that I didn't really appreciate until I was a bit older is just how fucking good of a rhythm player James Hetfield is.  Ask any guitar player and they'll tell you the same thing.  The man's dedication to downpicking damn near everything no matter the speed is unreal, his right wrist probably has a six pack.  Playing something like "Disposable Heroes" in one shot is a fucking endurance test for your picking hand, and he manages all of these things flawlessly.  It's not the most glamorous position in the world to be one of the best rhythm guitarists out there, but almost all of the band's tightness comes entirely from him.

And therein lies one of the things I love most about this album, it is somehow simultaneously their tightest offering while still being really loose.  Like a pair of bellbottoms, it's tight in the balls and loose at the ankles.  There are tempo shifts all over the place that the band obviously handles masterfully, but there are times where everything seems to kinda fall apart and it still sounds completely intentional.  Listen to "Battery" and really pay attention to the verse riff in relation to the vocals.  They almost sound like they're in completely different time sigs in completely different tempos.  The powerchords hit at strange, offputting times against the natural cadence of the lyrics, and it's all so god damned natural sounding that I never really noticed it until my 400th listen.  Also check out the verse riff to the title track.  The conventional wisdom (and official transcription) is that the verse riff consists of three measures in 4/4 time and tails on one measure of 5/8.  But if you actually play it as written it sounds completely wrong.  Switch that last bit to 6/8 and it sounds even wronger.  In actuality, through no real intention, that bar is actually played in fucking 21/32, purely because the guys were just playing by ear and doing whatever sounded right to them, and adding in that one random 32nd note of pause should've been a flow-breaking disaster that instead hits like a fucking hammer.  None of this was intentional progginess by a group of theory nerds, it's just what happens when you play by feeling and just run with the natural ebb and flow of your own manic riff-energy. 

Those two previous points tie into another thing I didn't really appreciate or understand until I was older, and that was just how... fucking weirdly wrong Lars's drumming is.  I didn't even notice this until it was pointed out to me, but he actually kinda fails miserably at the drummer's main fundamental job in any band.  He is not the timekeeper of the band, James is.  Whether his ineffable tightness is a coincidental complement or a learned necessity to Lars's bizarre, Bill Wardian sloppiness is up for debate, but that's what I meant when I said the band is tight entirely because of him earlier.  I had always thought of Lars as a brain dead simple rock drummer miscast in a thrash band, and I still think that to an extent, but once you start to really pick apart his performances you start to realize just how frequently he adds in rolling snare fills and random cymbal crashes at the least comprehensible times.  Listen to the outro of "Orion".  Just what the hell are you doing man?  Why is that china crash happening that one random ass time?  Why are you starting bars on random tom hits?  This odd looseness to his playing only amplifies that "tight but loose" thing I was talking about, the band is basically playing in free time but still sound like laser-guided riff machines.  And even with his incredibly obvious flaws, I always thought Lars (weak link though he is) was absolutely irreplaceable when it came to Metallica.  His style is so much more basic than pretty much every other thrash drummer, and I feel like his simplistic backbeats are a huge part of their identity and a big reason why they became as popular as they did in the first place.  Think about a track like "Disposable Heroes" or "Damage, Inc." and then think about how much fucking meaner and more extreme they would be if the only change was that Lars was replaced with Dave Lombardo or Ventor or something.  Would they be better?  I dunno, that's up to you to decide, but they would undoubtedly be much different if they were played in super precise double time and that one single change could make those songs simply un-Metallica.

I realize this is already getting pretty long and is very stream-of-consciousness, but honestly this is just a result of my lifelong relationship with the album.  My taste has quite obviously veered off into far more extreme directions over the years, but I've liked Metallica for literally as long as I've had memories, and I simply can not understate how utterly obsessed with them I was for years and years on end.  There are dozens of albums I've loved since I was a kid but comparatively few they I have actual memories tied to them.  For example, I think the seed for what would eventually blossom into my adulthood love of H.P. Lovecraft was planted more from "The Thing That Should Not Be" more than any other pop culture reference.  It certainly helps that I love the song on its own, I love that creepy, watery intro and I love how brutally it grinds along at a sluggish pace, repeatedly smashing you over the head over and over again until you're begging for a reprieve.  I can see why some would call it boring and repetitive, but god damn it works for me.  But no, what entranced me were the lyrics.  I know now that it's just kind of a lazy copy and paste of random Lovecraftian buzzwords, but when you're 8 years old you don't know that shit, dude.  To me it was so fucking dark and sinister and I felt almost like I was hearing something that I shouldn't.  It felt forbidden to my tiny brain.  I so distinctly remember laying on my bedroom floor while this song was playing, writing down the lyrics as I heard them and then drawing the images the lyrics conjured.  I know that what impressed me decades ago should mean nothing now that I'm a big brained boy, but simply hearing that chugging main riff instantly teleports me back to a sepia-toned warm-and-fuzzy of me doodling squiggly black-cloaked cultists conjuring an incomprehensible monster from the depths of a stormy sea.  Yeah I'm not being "objective" or whatever but if you're looking for objectivity in one of my reviews you can go eat sand and fuck back off to Minecraft you simpering git.

And since I've already gone this in-depth and personal, I might as well spray "Orion" with as much of my Burton Fanboy goo as possible.  It really isn't a stretch to say that "Orion" single-handedly solidified my choice to pick up a bass for the first time.  My heroes when I first started actually playing and writing (or at least attempting to write) my own music were Cliff and Geezer and basically nobody else, and I can't overstate how important this song was to me during that time.  All eight and a half minutes of this are coded into the muscles on my fingers, I made it such a point to learn this song front to back, and when I finally mastered it I felt like the king of the cosmos.  This really was Cliff's baby, you can tell.  He was the lone theory nerd in the band, he was the guy who had his nose buried in books and came up with most of the out-there melodicisms.  It was a popular thing for a while to say that Metallica never would've done what they did in the 90s if he was still alive but honestly he might've pushed them there even sooner.  "Orion" was his, he was the one with all of the less heavy ideas, he was the one who insisted on injecting melody into heaviness, he was the one who was into R.E.M. at the same time as he and the rest of the guys were pounding brews to Motorhead.  "Orion" is that marriage of jangly melodic bassiness blended with ripping palm mutes and screaming guitar solos that so encapsulated what Metallica was doing in 1986.  Everything was distilled into itself on "Orion" and I still love this song as much in 2019 as I did whenever it was that I first heard it.  That heavy "verse" riff that shows up a few times and carries out the heavy parts before the last fadeout is one of my favorite riffs of all time.  That gallop is just fucking sublime.

All that said, Master of Puppets is not without its flaws, I'm not completely blinded by nostalgia here.  The only real gripe I have with the album is "Sanitarium", which is, by a cosmic long shot, the shittiest "fourth track ballad" they produced in the classic run.  I'd argue that "The Day That Never Comes" is the lone worse one if you stretch it to their whole career, but "Fade to Black", "One", and "The Unforgiven" utterly demolish it in every way.  Hell even "Until It Sleeps", "The Unforgiven II", and the fuckin' Bob Seger cover on Garage Inc. completely trounce it.  This, to me, is the one song that feels completely obligatory.  It's like they were done with the album and then realized that their album formula required a ballad so they just ran back into the studio and banged one out in a half hour.  It's just totally unengaging apart from the solid bridge (and even then it's only like one chord away from recycling the verse riff from the title track wholesale), it just feels like the band sleepwalked through this one.  Whether you like the album or not, there's no denying that they weren't on autopilot for the other seven tracks.  You can't tear through something as explosive as "Battery" or as groovy and infectious as "Leper Messiah" without actually trying, but "Sanitarium" is the one and only point where it really sounds like they weren't.

I'm not sure if I've actually gotten my points across well here, and I might regret hitting the publish button as soon as I click it, but right now I just don't care.  I love Master of Puppets, it was a super important album to me and I think it still easily holds up today now that I spend way more time listening to Dying Fetus and Pissgrave.  I might've lost the plot a bit throughout this but I've gotten this far without bringing up the weird status this has gotten with the Extremely Online kids who went from noobs to know-it-alls within six months thanks to how easy it is to just stream music nowadays, but it's worth mentioning that this album doesn't deserve to be the battleground it's become.  It's extremely popular because at the time this was the thrash album with the most reach and accessibility.  Metallica opening for Ozzy in 86 gave them such a huge stage that this album has the distinction of selling over a million copies with no radio singles or music videos.  This wasn't the heaviest thing in 1986, lest you all forget that one of my favorite albums of all time is Reign in Blood so don't think I'm being obtuse here, but it was one of the most accessible and easy to get into.  And it's because of that relative safety of excellent songwriting coupled with frantically intense riffs and sheer aggression blended with just enough melody to catch ears and just enough extremity to be explosive without being alienating that likely millions of people even got into metal in the first place.  I'm not saying that we should be extra nice to this album and not judge it on its own merits simply because it was important and released at the exact right time, but I am saying that if you willingly ignore context on a selective basis (like saying it doesn't matter that this opened so many doors for so many people but it does matter that Dark Angel was faster and heavier) then you should know that I probably think you're a vacuous dullard with little else to be proud of beyond your ego.  Master of Puppets is an excellent record with a lot of ideas and most of them hit bullseye.

That's what matters to me.


RATING: 94%

Cabrio - Devotion and Hate

It's a'ight

To be completely honest with you, I have a nasty habit of treating Latin America as something of a meme when it comes to heavy metal.  I recognize the unfairness considering Brazil is an undisputed metal hotspot, with Sepultura and Sarcofago helping lay the groundwork for extreme metal in general (not to mention Vulcano and Krisiun), and of course we can't forget their strong power metal scene with Angra and Hibria.  Mexico gave the world The Chasm, and even the hellhole of Colombia is technically responsible for Inquisition (even though the vast majority of their music was released after Dagon moved to the US), et cetera et cetera.  I dunno, I think the inherent Engrish goofiness of Sarcofago rubbed off on a lot of bands in the region and the whole place became known for ALKOHOLIC HELLTHRASH 666!!!! type nonsense.  At least that's what happened in my own mind.

So it was with much trepidation that I decided to give Chilean thrashers, Cabrio, a listen.  My prejudices are pretty well ingrained at this point, so I can say with confidence that Devotion and Hate has done a lot to dispel the stereotypes in my mind.  Don't get me wrong, this is hellish thrash metal to the bone, but it puts forth a distinctly South American attitude while thankfully completely eschewing that idiotic SMOKE BEER!!! aesthetic I've always hated.  Cabrio plays a style that's very heavily rooted in the more American style of thrash that Exodus helped make popular with a hefty dose of the very metal-leaning hardcore of Hatebreed, but there's a raw edge to it that keeps it just rough and nasty enough to stand out.  I think it's the vocals that make the music impossible to fully divorce from their geographic origins.  Andres has a rather thick accent to his ferocious (yet clear) hardcore bark that stands out to my cornbread ass, so every shout of TWAHNNY THAHSSIN TAHNS immediately transports me to the southern hemisphere.

But taking all of that away, the music itself is vicious and entertaining.  Devotion and Hate is pounding thrash metal that never truly breaks out into a completely frantic pace, but there's a very heavy skippiness to the riffs that ensures the mighty weight of the band never gives way to dull grooves or fast-for-the-sake-of-it thrash.  The band's only real downfall is that the songwriting itself tends to rest on its laurels and doesn't always grab your attention.  There are great tracks here, like the monstrously heavy "Twenty Thousand Tons", the venom-spewing ferocity of "Seed of Deception", or the tempo-shifting maelstrom of "Dios Sin Fe", but most of the rest of the album just kinda unremarkably fades into the white noise.  What's here is indeed good, but it doesn't have a whole lot of lasting impact.  It's a flaw that's both major and minor, because when it is on, it's vicious and biting the whole way through.  Unfortunately, at some point you're gonna have to turn it off and listen to something else, and when that happens it might be tough to remember to revisit it.


RATING: 70%

Lost in Pain - Gold Hunters

*yawn*

Well I've got a new pin in my Metal Globe it seems.  According to MA, Luxembourg has had a grand total of 86 metal bands throughout history, only 38 of which are currently active.  So it's pretty cool to know that roughly 1% of the country's metal fans are all in Lost in Pain.

Lost in Pain is some sort of Schrodinger's Metal Band, existing as both the nebulous blend of trad/thrash metal that Metallica made their trademark in the mid 80s and as the heavier, more meaty modern thrash of post-The Gathering Testament (a band who themselves have always been massively influenced by Metallica, of course), and whichever one they sound more like depends on which influence you're looking for.  It's like one of those optical illusions that looks like either a duck or a rabbit depending on which way you look at it.  Gold Hunters sounds like either Metallica or Testament depending on which way your ears are shifted.

That's not to say they're a total clone band of the two though.  Nah, they do indeed sound like their own band, but the songs themselves don't really stand out a whole lot.  There are moments here and there, sure, like the breakdown at the end of "A Word" or the pounding bass intro of "Rebellious Protestors", but for the most part this is just kind of a blur of white noise.  For a band that focuses more on riffs and intensity than melody or atmosphere, they kinda drop the ball by not really having all that many great riffs or intense moments.  It's nice that the album is short and doesn't really get an opportunity to truly become boring, but apart from a few cool groovy moments or totally punishing double bass sections, this just kinda fades like Mr. Meeseeks the instant it's over and does what it sets out to do.  I kinda struggle with what exactly to call this, because it's very "modern" in every sense of the word but doesn't really sound like what you'd consider "modern metal" to be.  The opening title track focuses on a very Lamb of God style main riff before transitioning to a fairly pleasant and radio friendly chorus that's reminiscent of Trivium, but it never really sounds like the more metalcore aspects of either of those bands either, instead touching on their 80s thrash influences without ever being an 80s thrash throwback itself.  The closest we ever truly get is the closer, "The Great Illusion", which is basically their "Dyer's Eve".

So yeah, despite what I've said, if pressed for a definitive answer, I'd say this errs more on the modern Testament side than anything else.  And that's fine, Testament has had a few great tracks since their resurgence, but Gold Hunters doesn't really do anything exciting on its own.  The gruff vocals and massive production sound great but they aren't utilized in an exciting way.  The sound is here, the aggression is here, but the songwriting and staying power is lacking.


RATING: 50%

Overkill - Horrorscope

The eulogy he would've wanted

If you've followed my reviews for a while, you know that I've covered Overkill plenty throughout my career.  You'll also know that I've never given them a positive review.  It's true!  Somehow I've just always gravitated towards knocking them down a few pegs because they had so many albums I hated that people seemed to give a pass, and it always bewildered me.  However, I'm not an insane person.  As a thrash fan, I know damn well that Overkill has plenty of great albums too, and I think it's about high time I covered one.  I promised a friend I would do so a long time ago.  And now, in my perpetual lateness, I'm going to fulfill my promise to my now-fallen compatriot, and give an honest review of his all time favorite album (or maybe second place next to some choice albums from Limbonic Art or Kalmah or something), Overkill's fifth and arguably finest album, Horrorscope.

The most obvious and major factor most people should realize when it comes to this album is the not-so-amicable departure of longtime axe-slinger Bobby Gustafson.  Overkill may be most obviously defined by Blitz's signature nasally snarl and D.D. Verni's mega-trebly *dween* bass tone, but Gustafson was a force to be reckoned with in the early days, churning out classic riffs left and right ("Hammerhead" from the debut contains one of my all time favorite riffs ever written) and writing a good chunk of the music, in particular the (frankly undeserving, but hey) classic The Years of Decay.  Him getting the boot should have been a huge blow to the band's sound, but Blitz and D.D. ain't no fuckin' quitters so they just regrouped and hammered out one of the monsters of early 90s thrash in retaliation. 

I've made this point over and over, but thrash was never great necessarily because of Overkill, instead Overkill was great because thrash as a genre was great.  This shows here, because the early 90s was a good era to be a product of the times as a thrash band.  The album I've always seen to be the parallel to Horrorscope is Kreator's seminal Coma of Souls, what with both having a really dry-yet-punchy production and a heightened influence of slower, more crushing moments in conjunction with their customary neck wrecking tempos.  This might seem immediately odd, because one of my biggest complaints with The Years of Decay is that there are too many slow songs that bog down the pace and break the flow, but the big difference here is that the slower tracks here are just flat out fucking excellent.  While something like "Skullkrusher" just sounded slow with little else in mind, something like "Horrorscope" or "New Machine" sounds like there's a clear goal at stake.  For example, something like the title track actually feels like a true marriage of thrash and doom metal, something the band had attempted before and would continue to attempt throughout their career and never quite nail again.  It's slow, but the riffs are menacing and pounding instead of meandering and dull.  It's still a driving force, and the extended one note breakdown just absolutely decimates with the addition of something simple like the haunting guitar melody in the background.  "Nice Day... for a Funeral" utilizes this same trick and it sort of astounds me that they never managed to make this work again, because it turns out this nebulous coagulation of melancholy and malice creates an incredibly neat effect.  "New Machine" may actually be my favorite of these tracks for an entirely different reason.  That one sounds more like a simplified version of "Who Tends the Fire" but works 1000% better simply because it gets to the point quicker and is carried by a super tight groove.  Yeah, this is basically just a groove metal track, something they'd tie their noose to before flailing around for 20 years and failing to write more than a handful good ones despite focusing entirely on them, but damn if their first foray into the style isn't a home run.  That main riff is an absolute banger.

However, this is motherfucking Overkill we're talking about here.  The fact that their constant experimentation with slower tempos finally worked this time is a nice bonus, but it's not what makes Horrorscope such a classic.  Hell no, it's their fervent dedication to punk-infused attitude entwined seamlessly with top-tier thrashing mayhem that made them stand out in the first place, and this is arguably their most consistently vicious offering of tracks in that vein.  "Coma" kicks things off with a nice clean intro to lull you into a false safety, because once the riffs start the band makes extra god damned clear that they mean fucking business.  I've never once heard the section with the double bass in the intro and not immediately sought out the nearest living thing and punched it to death.  The lion's share of the music here follows somewhat in line with The Years of Decay, what with the extremely obvious Metallica influence shining through with the monstrously chunky riffs and decidedly simplistic drumming carrying most of the songs.  It's like if that 1989 album was full of tracks like "Elimination" an "Evil Never Dies" all the way through, because it's just a non stop riff attack and it shows up most of their contemporaries.  Overkill was never the fastest or the heaviest of their peers, but this is one of those times when it didn't matter for them, and through the power of sheer songwriting fortitude they managed to deliver an unreal streak of excellence.  "Thanx for Nothin'" shoves their punk roots in your face without ever sacrificing an ounce of their osmium, and the chorus can whip any crowd into a frenzy effortlessly.  "Live Young, Die Free" and "Bare Bones" rip and tear through listeners as if they were paper, with riffs so simultaneously fast and chunky that they sound like tommy guns that fire raw steaks.  I could be a dick and point out that they both sound an awful lot like "Battery" but if you haven't noticed, the frequent Metallica-isms work to this album's benefit rather than its detriment.  Instead of sounding like a calculated knockoff of Master of Puppets like the previous album did, this sounds like the lost album recorded in lieu of And Justice for All.  It's a logical continuation of what they were doing before, except this time they decided to push further towards the extreme end of the spectrum instead of settling on an easier-to-digest groove.  No, this is one of the gloriously few times that Overkill found themselves truly pushing an envelope, because this is by far the hungriest they've ever sounded.  As a result, Horrorscope is probably the most Overkill album that Overkill ever released.  This is the one where they truly solidified their identity to me, and it's a damn shame that they abandoned it so quickly.

There are nitpicks but they're just that, nitpicks.  Blitz doesn't sound quite as manic as the albums from the Three Bobbys era, and he's really the only musical aspect of the band that didn't make a massive improvement.  There aren't any moments like that insanely tense crescendo in "Evil Never Dies" here, instead he just does his thing in a fairly utilitarian manner.  Fortunately that's not really a big deal because even when he's in pure workman mode and giving the guitars the spotlight, he stands out for his iconic vocal delivery alone.  The solos aren't quite as memorable either, but that's to be expected because even when Overkill finally got their shit together and released another great album 19 years later, they never fully managed to replace Gustafson's absolute wizardry on the fretboard.  "Infectious" is a kind of meh song and the Edgar Winter cover is entirely pointless as well, but overall that's really all the negative things I have to say about this album. 

Feel the Fire will always be the band's finest hour to me, but their first two albums have a pretty different approach than what came afterwards, and if you want to split hairs so finely that you're in danger of nuclear fission, Horrorscope is unquestionably the highlight of the second phase of the band's first era.  This was the sound of a band in lockstep with one another, taking a brutal departure in stride instead of reeling and scrambling to make something work in his absence.  I know Horrorscope is a very well respected album, but it deserves even more than it gets, which is saying a lot.  This is 53 minutes of non stop action that feels like it flies by in 30.  Overkill wouldn't be this exciting and adrenaline-inducing for nearly two solid decades, and it's a great swansong for the classic era of the genre in general.  Everybody should be familiar with it, and if you're not, fucking fix that right the hell now, because this is a stone cold classic.


RIP Diamhea, you were a monster truck that walked like a man.  I'm sorry you aren't here to see me make an attempt to fulfill a dumb promise I made purely out of respect for such an insanely dedicated individual.  Hopefully I made good on my end.  You are the Beef Castle that took a lot of shit in stride and deserve all the credit in the world for making this site run as smoothly as it has for the past five years you were on the team.  Oh, and never forget: !!!FUCK YOU!!!


RATING: 94%

Vulture - The Guillotine

I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?

Vulture made a lot of waves last year, but I'm just gonna skip to the punchline and say that the general metal listening public has really short term memory, because this is rethrash to the bone.  Remember when thrash had that resurgence in the late 2000s and was immediately flooded with tryhard losers who put on a thrasher costume and ripped off the same two or three bands until everybody got sick of them?  Well Vulture is exactly that.  A little better than most of them thanks to the heightened Razorisms, but still guileless, inoffensive thrash that's way to proud of itself simply for being thrash.

Thrash as a genre isn't exactly ripe for experimentation, so I tend not to hold it against bands for being unoriginal (I loved the shit out of Condor last year and they're just Aura Noir reincarnated), but I guess the reason that Vulture irks me enough to write about is because The Guillotine itself doesn't really do anything interesting within its own runtime.  You get the gist of the album with the first track and then basically hear it repeated seven more times with diminishing returns.  "Vendetta" starts off with an ominous piano/string intro, building a pretty solid sense of foreboding, before just exploding forwards with hyperspeed riffs out the wazoo, rife with ear piercing falsetto shrieks and shredding solos.  Then the following seven songs all do the exact same thing, give or take the quiet intros.  The immediate comparison I could think of was Evil Invaders, if a little bit more on the thrash than the speed metal side (but only barely) except not quite as exciting.  The wild soloing is there, but it's not quite as ferocious or over the top as their Belgian contemporaries.  The vocals are primarily made up of frenzied shrieking, but it sounds more like a calculated crutch (quite literally every single song features a double tracked "ooooooooooOOOOWYAAaAaAaAaAAAH" screech) whereas Evil Invaders sounds more like they're fronted by a dangerous lunatic who can't control or restrain himself in any way.  I don't want to keep comparing them to another modern band but it's hard when every single aspect of Vulture that could be great can be so easily improved by simply looking a few miles towards the western border.

So Vulture is a thrashier variant of classic speed metal in the vein of Razor and Exciter, so you figure the two areas where they'd absolutely excel would be speed and intensity nearly by default, and in truth they only truly succeed with half of that.  There's no doubt that The Guillotine runs along at a ridiculously high tempo, with even more midpaced sections appearing in tracks like "This Night Belongs to the Dead" cruising along at warp speed.  The problem is that there's very little beef behind the riffs.  They're all lightning quick but carry little of the inherent devastation of their meteorological point of comparison.  The riffs that make up these songs are all flashy and zip by nearly instantaneously with their enviable quickness, but there's to accompanying thunder to them.  They happen and then they're over, they're cool but have no lasting effect.  Usually with albums that have this issue, they can work to make up for a lack of riffing prowess by blowing the listener away with some other aspect, but as previously mentioned, they don't really do that either.  The soloing is quite good but sounds obligatory, if that makes sense.  The vocals are wild and crazy but land a little too close to the terrible vocals you'd find on third tier nobodies like Dismantle.  This sort of "I can't actually sing but I can snarl and do the 'Angel of Death' intro" works a little better with this more melodic style, but it can still be grating.  He does occasionally belt out a scream that sounds more frothing and insane (most notably at the very end of the album, closing out "Cry for Death") but it's not nearly often enough to keep me interested.

All in all this is an exceedingly average album with a few neat moments that spends far too much time repeating itself to really break out.  Probably my favorite intangible when it comes to metal is "danger", and there's very little that's actually dangerous about Vulture.  They're fast and... not much else.  They don't sound all that powermad or frantic or chaotic or anything, they play by the rules of their chosen genre and only add tongue waggling speed to the mix without a solid base of excellent riffs to hold the whole thing together.  So it's whatever.  I have no ending for this review.

Screw Flanders.


RATING - 55%

QUICK HITS: Condor - Unstoppable Power

Crispy Zu Skewers

Thrash's not dead??  Nah, it's still more or less a creative dead end in terms of innovation potential, but that just means that the great bands stand out purely for being really fucking good at thrashing.  Condor definitely shows themselves worthy of hype in the Dead Riff Era, because Unstoppable Power is a venom fueled blast of blackened thrash insanity.  I still seem to prefer Power Trip at this juncture, but Condor is ridiculously fucking close behind.  It's especially cool because, like I said, there's nothing inherently mega-creative about the band, it's just Aura Noir styled hyperthrash with smatterings of black metal misanthropy and grit.  It's the exact kind of thing that Witchaven was all about nearly a decade ago that I couldn't stop masturbating over.  The album tends to fluctuate between the balls out black metal-infused tremolo salvos and more traditional bay area thrashing cranked up to 11.  Compare the bestial hunger in "Embraced By the Evil" to the more focused riff assault of "You Can't Stop the Fire".  The stylistic differences between the tracks on Unstoppable Power are almost imperceptibly subtle, but they're there, and it's good to note that the band is quite skilled at handling all of them.  I think the main reason this stands out so much to me despite thrash as a whole being so fucking dull and played out nowadays is because of something very simple that a lot of bands had mastered in the 80s and most of the copycats completely screwed up in the 00s, and that's the balance between intensity and hooks.  Calling Condor "melodic" in any sense of the word is misleading, because this is all about furious blasting helldeath from the get-go, but there's a very 80s sense of riff writing here, because like the earliest outings of Exodus and Sodom, there is a marvelous sense of infectiousness intertwined with nuts-first freneticism in the riffage.  Check out something like "Chained Victims" or "83 Days of Radiation" for an audible example of what I'm talking about, it's excellent stuff.  When Nocturnal Breed crawled out of their hole a few years ago and finally followed up the excellent Fields of Rot, this is the album I was hoping to hear instead of the thoroughly forgettable Napalm Nights.  Norway may be known for black metal, but Condor definitely shows that those frozen buttcicles know how to thrash just as well.  Like Ripper was the underground foil to the mainstream darling Vektor in 2016, Condor is to Power Trip in 2017.


RATING: 88%

GOSPEL OF GARGOYLE: TL;DR VERSION

For those who don't want to read nearly 27000 words about Gargoyle, I present to you the tl;dr version, in haiku.

Humble beginnings.
Like children, they scream real loud.
Exuberant youth.

They show their true form.

Formula solidified.

OG Ruten disc.

One true to its name.

An uncut gem to behold.

Embrace the weirdness.

 Furious throwback.

Here they discover the trick.

Just yell a whole bunch.

The She-ja sendoff.

Astounding Heaven Theory.

Melodic. Speedy.

Despite macho tunes,

I want to fuck Yotaro.

I don't care who sees.

A natural change.

It still includes heavy shit.

A fuckload, in fact.

This has "Satori"

What the fuck else do you need?

Best damn song ever.

I mean, this one's fine.

It's probably their weirdest.

Refrigerator.

OH FUCK OH FUCK YES!

OH GOD YES YES YES FUCK YES!

SPANK ME DADDY-O!

Yotaro is gone.

Kentaro is who remains.

Turns out they still rule.

Battle Gargoyle.

Like regular Gargoyle.

But battle-ier.

Fury and thunder.

The Beast Road has been traveled.

It leads to more riffs.

Breaking Dragon Wind.

Their first kinda "meh" album.

Still some great tracks though.

A final hurrah.

The last bastion of the weird.

Breathe deep one last time.

"The world needs more riffs."

So speaketh the Gargoyle.

The world got more riffs.

They're normal for once.
Still just raging riffs all day.
Kuromitten's rad.

 Some great, some boring.

Either way it still kicks ass.

Just needs a fat trim.

Seriously, why?

Why is this so god damned good?

You're old men now, chill!

 Wait, I was bluffing!

Don't listen to me, Kiba.

Go crazy again.

Now THIS is good shit.

Geshiki will wreck your neck.

Katsuji goes nuts.

 Thirty years later.

The debut is now long past.

Yet they still scream loud.

GOSPEL OF GARGOYLE: Gargoyle - Taburakashi

XXII: Cajolement

After Geshiki pretty much knocked ten points off my IQ score since I headbanged myself into several concussions during its runtime, how could I not be excited for the followup?  I've mentioned before that their album covers are great in their simplicity, but they sometimes don't necessarily give a real indication of what the record is going to contain.  Stuff like Tsuki no Toge, Future Drug, and Geshiki don't necessarily telegraph unending brutality and neck-wrecking fury, but that's absolutely what they deliver.  However, when the details for Taburakashi was revealed in 2016, there was absolutely no fucking mistaking it, this was going to be pure molten steel, nothing but full force razor sharp riffage with no room to breathe.

That's exactly what we got this time.

Taburakashi pulls precisely zero punches and pretty much wrecks faces from the start.  It's got all the ferocity of Future Drug with the single-minded focus of Kemonomichi or Kuromitten, which essentially means it's just like Geshiki, just a little less creative.  That's not to say this is all that much of a step down, because it still smokes.  Gargoyle definitely seems to be in something of a late career renaissance, much like how Judas Priest shat out Painkiller (a Top 5 All Time album of mine, personally) twenty years into their career, Gargoyle started amping up the energy and drive several decades into their career as well.  Right when it starts, "Yaban Kairo" is introduced with a quick shout of the title and then the band explodes.  This is the new "Shi Ni Itaru Kizu" as far as I'm concerned, and I love the shit out of that song.  That's clearly the template they went with for this opening track yet again, and just like all of the opening tracks since "Jet Tiger", it's a Powergoyle classic that lays the melody on so thick that it pretty much smothers it.  There's a pleasant melodicism in Kiba's voice that you don't hear all that often in the chorus here, like he's putting much more effort into truly singing instead of just shouting like an insane person most of the time.  It's sort of a throwback to their wondeful 90s era in that regard.  Granted he's never going to hit the highs of classics like Natural but dammit he's trying, and that's way more than I can say for Kijuu.

This fucking this basically never slows down.  Even the token misplaced ballady song, "Dare Ga Tame ni Ame Wa Furu" just blinks itself out of existence since it's inbetween the monstrous thrasher, "No Entry", and one of the most fucknuts insanely shreddy melodic songs they've ever written in "GO GO GALAPAGOS" (though it does admittedly at least tie "SHIT Shitto SHIT" for their worst song title ever).  There's also "Tada Hitosuji ni Yuku" near the end which also one of their more melodic and pleasant rock songs, but it just sorta happens without me noticing.  So yes, that does mean these are the two weakest songs on display, but the rest of the album sits on such a plateau that I tend to forget they're even featured.

But on that note, that does make this album sorta difficult to describe since it's like most Moderngoyle releases in that it's mostly just one style.  It's crazily heavy and unabashedly melodic thrash/speed metal with power metal influences here and there with a psychotic vocalist who just screams all of his lines like a whacko.  There's a lot of effort put into this release regardless, it really does seem like there's a renewed love for their craft at this point in time for the band.

Don't take that to mean there are no highlights, because this album has motherfucking "Dragon Skull" on it, which is oh god so fucking good.  This is Gargoyle at their thrashiest and heaviest.  I never really found the words to describe what makes their style so different, but I think I'm starting to understand that, especially from Bushin onwards, they've managed to perfect the art of making things fast and thrashy but also heavy.  Like, you're probably thinking of something like Sodom when I say that, but I mean every single note comes off with as much weight and force as a focused breakdown.  Every riff sounds like the break in "Tired and Red" at double speed without thinning out the sound at all.  These riffs sound like assault rifles that fire bazooka shells, they're so fucking meaty and powerful and yet come at you at such a relentless pace that it almost defies explanation.  That's particularly where "Dragon Skull" excels.  That main riff that rips out eight seconds in after the band drops the intro and just shouts "DOO-RA-GUUUUN SKALL" is just unfairly fucking heavy.  Even the fairly light chorus (in comparison to the brutality of the verses) still sounds skull crushing.  I'm completely in love with this song.

There are other magnificent tracks, like the ludicrously fast and drenched-in-melody "Be Daring", straddling the line between their heavy and melodic styles so well that it goes from the speedy and energetic main melody to chest beating blast beats in seconds.  "Crumbling Roar" is another ludicrously crunchy song with a blistering main riff, and the chorus stands out for more of Kiba's actual singing coming through (or at least attempting to), that "Coo-RAAAAMBUUUUUHLING ROOoOoOoOR" is another cool moment of relentlessly heavy melodicism that the band has made their bread and butter over the years.  "GO GO GALAPAGOS" is, as mentioned, crazily shreddy and has some insane leadwork going on, like the band entered the studio and told Kentaro "Alright buddy, for this next song, just do literally anything you want; go as insane as you want to go and we'll try to keep up with you" and he responded by screaming like Speedy Gonzalez and shredding like Skwisgaar Skwigelf. 

I think I've finally run out of words, I've finally reached the point where there's only so much you can say about Gargoyle.  Their highly creative run in the 90s may have petered out, but instead of becoming a dull rehash of previous ideas, Taburakashi shows that they've only refocused themselves and honed in on specific skills throughout their career.  So they may not be the quirky weirdos from Japan who would intersperse hyper fast thrash anthems with cultural oddities and irresistably catchy funky party songs anymore, but they've evolved into one of the most laser-guided ferocious thrash bands on the planet with a penchant for searingly uplifting melodies along with unstoppable charismatic chest-beating bravado.  It's unreal, I've never seen a band remain so good for so long.  Physics shouldn't allow Gargoyle to exist.

But they do.

And they're not going anywhere.


RATING - 87%



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HOLY SHIT GUYS I DID IT!   This was a gigantic project for me, and easily the most time consuming one I've ever worked on.  Twenty two reviews for one band can be absolutely draining (hell doing just five for Mastodon was difficult as hell for me), and it's why I've never bothered to do it for any of my other favorite bands (like Running Wild or Cannibal Corpse).  Gargoyle is a different breed and much easier to speak about in a loose, free manner.  Regardless, it was a huge commitment and, even if it took two extended breaks and a total of nearly three and a half years to complete, I'm glad I've finally been able to more or less close the book on this pet project of mine.  Really, I'm peeling back the curtain a bit here, but I don't really drown in views.  I don't really put a whole lot of effort into advertising this site, and the fans/notoriety I may have stems more from the Metal Archives than this site where I have a little more freedom to goof off and go off on extended diatribes about Wintersun.  The point is, a vast majority of my reviews get somewhere from 150-300 views.  They get to much more eyes via MA for sure (since this site's views mainly come from my personal Facebook or people who click the link in my sig on the MA forum) but I don't have the stats for that.  Even though I normally break triple digits for most reviews, this Gargoyle series averages somewhere between 40-70.  Nobody reads this series, but never once did I consider dropping it in favor of something to gain more exposure.  This was a labor of love for sure, this was something I wanted to do simply as a tribute to the most underappreciated metal band on the planet.  Hopefully I did my part.  If anybody has gotten into the band because of this series, then it was worth it to me.

Also yuuuuuge shoutout to Crick, that not-so-mysterious cohort of mine I've mentioned a few times throughout the reviews that introduced me to the band in the first place.  He's been a massive help in feeding me trivia and behind-the-scenes info about the band, and giving me new perspective on several things since our opinions on the band differ greatly at times, despite us both loving them to pieces.  He's the one who noticed the "Enigma" riff is the same as "Creeping Death", he's the one who pointed out that "Doumushishubai" isn't even a real word and the real title was actually "Doumu Lullaby", he's the one who fucking coined the term "Moderngoyle" as far as I know.  None of this could have ever happened without him.

And that's all folks!  I plan on doing some more with this series in the future, but until another canonical full length or EP comes out, the main series is finally and officially finished.  There will be some addendums here and there for some of the other important things I missed (Fuuin, Ububoe, maybe Borderless or the G Manual series), but there's no timeframe and no order, just whenever I get the spark.  There will also be a fun little extra tonight because I fuckin' feel like it, okay?

I love all of you.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you for heeding The Gospel.


Final word count: 26880