Cost: $2.00
The cover immediately gave me flashbacks of drawing simple cityscapes as part of a linear perspective assignment in high school art class (vanishing points, anyone?). While I support the concept of the hastily-sketched city getting nuked, the cloud looks more like a tree. It's all just extremely amateurish, like art that should be on a demo CD-R limited to 25 copies. I felt a little better after seeing the Motörhead and Slayer shirts in the band pics, but unfortunately in some ways the cover is very fitting.
This is thrash that's neither particularly classic sounding, and nor is it terribly modern sounding (thankfully). There's some stylistic variety here, with some parts having quite punky speed and others being somewhat groovy, but the songs themselves aren't terribly memorable. Mostly it seems like an unfocused take on various tropes taken from AJFA/Black Album-era Metallica--thrashier sections are used to bridge slower, groovier sections that I wouldn't really call pure thrash themselves, and two successive tracks have acoustic intros that are very evocative of "One" or "Nothing Else Matters."
What further brings this down are the vocals--the band are young and unfortunately it really shows in the singing. The clean vox verge on whiny and sound like something that would much better fit a pop-punk or emo band. The only popular comparison I can really think to draw is Gerard Way, although I was shocked that some of the vocal patterns in "Foul Mouth" reminded me of the NWOBHM band A-II-Z. I suppose the guy realized his singing was kind of wimpy and lacking in aggression, as there are some horrible attempts at forced aggro vocals which are even worse. It's no wonder my favorite track on this album is the instrumental.
Despite the hokey cover, lyrics, and vocals, the musicianship is pretty competent even if it's not always to my taste, although I don't feel it's used for anything great. Based on them being able to scrape together a few decent thrash riffs and due to the scarcity of the disc, I'll say this is a decent find for the price. But it's definitely more like school battle of the bands metal than serious thrash.
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