There are few things in the metal world that range as wide as thrash metal. Thrash runs the gamut from the serious to the silly. Progressive and technical thrash bands write sprawling epics about deep emotional, sociological, or political ideas, and there are crossover thrash bands who spit on the…
Hello fellow pit-sters! This month, I thought we could do something a little different. You all know I’ve been playing fast and loose with the schedule of this column, and August will be no different! Fellow thrash Josh Bulleid and I thought we’d introduce ourselves to you all a little…
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…
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…
It’s safe to say that the supposedly b-tier thrash acts have largely outshone the genre’s more prominent acts in the modern era. Once-overlooked bands like Testament, Exodus, Kreator and (I’ll even concede) Overkill have consistently put the bulk of the Big Four’s output to shame, at least since the turn…
Welcome to Connecting the Dots, the column where we give a brief rundown on a central band along with a host of other projects their members, both past and present, have been involved in. Today we’ll be focusing on progressive sludge powerhouse Mastodon and the myriad of projects they’ve been involved with.
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…
