Bay Area thrash legends Death Angel have returned bringing us Humanicide, an album endeavoring to lay out a portrait of a decaying world in all its forms. The band are one of those veteran groups who once stood hopefully alongside Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and Metallica until circumstances took them in…
The debut album of The Damned Things, Ironiclast, came seemingly out of left-field in December of 2010. A hard-rock album with a hefty blues influence that included instrumental backing from members of Fall Out Boy (Joe Trohman & Andy Hurley), Anthrax (Scott Ian), ex-Anthrax (Rob Caggiano, currently of Volbeat) and From…
If there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s blackened thrash. In some ways, it’s the original black metal sound. It’s chaotic and raucous, just like we all love our metal. However, it’s also overtly dark and evil sounding, a constant grind on your senses that still has its…
So far on this column, I’ve referred to a lot of the heavy hitters of the subgenre. I personally have a lot more thoughts about them because there’s just a lot more material to go through with them. It’s the same for people who are really into Shakespeare. There’s just…
No band have waved the flag for traditional thrash metal harder and higher than Overkill. Whether they invented the genre or not is debatable, but the New Yorkers appear assured in their position its single greatest producers. The band have steadily been putting out records every two-to-three years since 1985,…
Let’s start 2019 by negating a column! Well, that’s not entirely what we’re doing here, but stay with me. Last year, I wrote a piece about how Testament should be considered a Big 4 band. To me, their sound fit the vibe a bit more than Anthrax. Anthrax just really…
I may have bemoaned the decline of thrash in previous columns. If you have been keeping up with me, you would think that there’s really no such thing as modern thrash. “Huh, that’s too bad. It must’ve died in 1993 or something.” Well, sorta? It would be tough to find…
Guys, I really tried with Anthrax. I fully intended to write a defense of Anthrax as a Big 4 band. Ask my girlfriend. Ask the editors. Ask anybody who lets me talk about the blog to them. I really wanted to do that. I had a great plan! I intentionally started the Testament column with “ANTHRAX SUX LOL” because I wanted to write, “And whoever that idiot was who said Anthrax sucks can go play in traffic!” It was going to be so great. Self-deprecating humor is disarming, even if total comment thread dopes can’t understand tongue-in-cheek humor via the written word.
I had listened to some Anthrax records before, so I had some idea of what I was in for. “Sure, there might be some stinkers here, but overall I’ll find what I need.” And then I started listening. And I kept listening. Fistful of Metal. Spreading the Disease. Among the Living. State of Euphoria. When I got to Persistence of Time, a thought occurred to me.
I still can’t defend Anthrax. I just can’t do it.
It hasn’t been too long since we told you about Turin’s Ultra-Violence, a band approaching thrash metal from a clever and convincing perspective. The secret to the formula was injecting it with plenty of heavy metal influences, found on emotional outros, killer bass lines and larger than life choruses. Seeing as the band hail from what we’d consider a “musical periphery” and don’t exactly conform to many of the habits of the more mainstream and settled scenes of metal, digging into their influences presented us with a tantalizing opportunity. And thus, we are proud to present to you today a host of interesting picks from Loris Castiglia (vocals/guitars).
Let’s just kick this into high gear immediately with some thrash real talk. HOT TAKE: Anthrax sucks. Everyone just keep your pants on for that. Whenever a discussion of the Big 4 comes up, inevitably it becomes an argument about Anthrax. There’s no question that Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer should…
