format: Mini-LP
year: 1987
country: USA
label: Beta Records
#: Printed innersleeve w/ lyrics & photo-collage
info: BDD/002
style: Thrash Metal
Side A:
Side B:
"Ol' Dirty Thrash" - one of the most revered nongenres of the Heavy Metal twenties, so let's pay homage to one of its finest and most overlooked underground examples shall we!
So there I was, a 20-sumthin' innocent boy on my way to the Roskilde festival in the early 90's, probably all stoked to watch Miranda Sex Garden, The Velvet Underground, Itch or what-bloody-ever rocked my world at the time but of course a one-day round-trip to the Copenhagen record shops was a mandatory weekend pitstop. It so happened that one particular shop had a deadstock of dozens of copies of both albums by this neat-looking Texas Thrash-act called TORTURE in their bargain-bin, and with some super-early 80's nostalgia kicking in I instantly grabbed one of each. Unlike many other spontaneous grabs from that era, I never had to regret it.
I could cut this review pretty feckin' short right here and just write "New Rennaisance-Metal on the wrong label" and that would pretty much sum it up, but let's not be THAT lazy. Opening tune "Into The Darkness" is 99% pure MEDIEVAL-filth and of course this means it's bloody perfect and need no more descriptors than that. The perfectly christened instrumental "Whips Of The Antichrist" follows and to no-one's surprise it's amateur Slayer-worship all the way to the crypt - the way Bloodcum or Papsmear did it in their prime.
...and let's have moment of silence for Power Metal - the genre - after it got absolutely MASSACRED by the Torture-song bearing its monicker in 1987. It died a most violent death that day, because apparently it's just another way of describing SICK, pre-'87 proto-Death Metal* bent on ripping the flesh off your bones a la Infernal Majesty or any other Canadian band of your choice and not a descriptor for mildly fast HM with Maiden-harmonies at all. Who would've guessed?
The closing 8 min title track continues in the same merciless manner 'til the Bitter. Fucking. End. and from here let's be really quick about it and jump directly to the 1988 full-length LP for a 10-word review of: Also good-good but cleaner. True Thrashers must buy both.
* = Yes, I'm aware the way Onslaught 'pwnd' this monicker in 1985 makes this argument even more complicated.