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9 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

 

Dialed up Wolfbrigade's latest The Enemy: Reality just to refresh my memory, and one of the Yotube comments was "Take one part Motorhead, one part Discharge and one part Dismember. Mix roughly. Fucking love this band" That sounds about right to me. I will say they do sound a lot more like fellow Swedes Entombed on this one than I had remembered. But that just tells me that Entombed had gotten more crusty/punky than I'd remembered, not that Wolfbrigade no longer qualifies as a crust band. To be honest, I only ever really listen to the first few Entombed releases, I've never been a huge fan and I have not kept up with what they've been up to over the last 20 years or the A.D. version of the band or anything. I'm more of a Wolfbrigade fan. But I usually go with the middle releases: Prey '07, Comalive '08 and Damned '12.

 

See I was right - they have gone more modern Entombed hence my comment more metal than punk.  It's semantics to a degree but I do think a crustpunk band needs more punky elements than metal.  And some of the song on The Enemy: Reality are actually closer to death n roll.  I actually own that one on vinyl cause I just love the yellow cover!  

I would say 1 part Discharge, 1 part Motorhead, 2 parts more modern Entombed

It's like that Sacrilege album I listened to yesterday - it's basically crossover thrash.  Sure some of the beats and vocals are punky but the riff styles and overall vibe is pure crossover - it sits well with stuff like Nuclear Assault.

 

I do think a lot of punk fans refuse to acknowledge when their bands become metal.  I remember so many of the melodic metalcore guys ala Darkest Hour or Unearth refusing to acknowledge they played metal even though their music was often an At The Gates or Carnal Forge clone.  The funniest was when Randy Blyth sadly admitted Lamb of God had nothing to do with hardcore/punk and was pure metal:

"We started as a punk band with kinda metal riffs and for the first few years I refused to refer to us as a metal band because we weren’t. I wound up in a metal band by accident because we just became more and more metal."

A punk band with metal riffs is a metal band or at least metalcore/crossover!  And they haven't changed that much over the years!

I've seen a lot of old school types do this too  eg a refusal to acknowledge bands like Discharge got more metal in the 1980s or that a lot of modern hardcore took influence from Pantera and Sepultura.  Or the extreme metal guys in US who think death metal is a pure punk invention and ignore influence of thrash metal or even NWOBHM (bands like Raven) and speed metal (eg Exciter).  It's as if Slayer or early Metallica never existed.  I have met a couple of punk fans who said that Venom, early Kreator, Slayer and even early Helloween (ie Walls of Jericho) were punk and not metal.  One also insisted Iron Maiden weren't metal but hardrock.  Apparently metal doesn't even exist.

 

Basically I think punk/hardcore's elitism is worse than metal.

 

And it's not a "I can't listen to punk" thing either - Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedies and Bodies by Sex Pistols are two of my favourite songs of all time and they're punk as fuck (though Dead Kennedies mix some surf rock into it).  I would never say early Discharge or G.B.H. are metal.  I love Vision of Disorder's Imprint and that album is a true example of metallic hardcore.  It's vibe and style is closer to hardcore than metal.  

 

The song you picked from the Entombed album was probably one of the less "punky" ones.

 

Also this one:

 

NP Disfuneral - Blood Red Tentacle

Old school DM* - Entombed meets Autopsy.

*Or is that crust punk/hardcore/ska/pop punk/postpunk/Oui! Punk/Riot Grrl/*insert favourite punk genre, denying existence of metal punk*

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6 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

This is so fkn good, just getting around to it now. Japanese band, sounds like Carcass worship to me but it's done very well, this is mandatory listening. 700 Yen for digital which works out to $5.58 US, quite reasonable I think for a 46 minute album of quality riffy death metal or deathgrind such as this. Good lookin' out. Guess I'll have to check out the debut from 2020 next.

 

Pharmacist - Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition

 

...WhiteNoise....I only just discovered them last year.....and I picked up their first full length and found out they had a bunch of splits...still looking for them....this new one is fucking fyre.....glad you liked it.....

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13 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

See I was right - they have gone more modern Entombed hence my comment more metal than punk.  It's semantics to a degree but I do think a crustpunk band needs more punky elements than metal.  And some of the song on The Enemy: Reality are actually closer to death n roll.  I actually own that one on vinyl cause I just love the yellow cover!  

I would say 1 part Discharge, 1 part Motorhead, 2 parts more modern Entombed

It's like that Sacrilege album I listened to yesterday - it's basically crossover thrash.  Sure some of the beats and vocals are punky but the riff styles and overall vibe is pure crossover - it sits well with stuff like Nuclear Assault.

 

I do think a lot of punk fans refuse to acknowledge when their bands become metal.  I remember so many of the melodic metalcore guys ala Darkest Hour or Unearth refusing to acknowledge they played metal even though their music was often an At The Gates or Carnal Forge clone.  The funniest was when Randy Blyth sadly admitted Lamb of God had nothing to do with hardcore/punk and was pure metal:

"We started as a punk band with kinda metal riffs and for the first few years I refused to refer to us as a metal band because we weren’t. I wound up in a metal band by accident because we just became more and more metal."

A punk band with metal riffs is a metal band or at least metalcore/crossover!  And they haven't changed that much over the years!

I've seen a lot of old school types do this too eg a refusal to acknowledge bands like Discharge got more metal in the 1980s or that a lot of modern hardcore took influence from Pantera and Sepultura.  Or the extreme metal guys in US who think death metal is a pure punk invention and ignore influence of thrash metal or even NWOBHM (bands like Raven) and speed metal (eg Exciter). It's as if Slayer or early Metallica never existed.  I have met a couple of punk fans who said that Venom, early Kreator, Slayer and even early Helloween (ie Walls of Jericho) were punk and not metal.  One also insisted Iron Maiden weren't metal but hardrock.  Apparently metal doesn't even exist.

Basically I think punk/hardcore's elitism is worse than metal.

And it's not a "I can't listen to punk" thing either - Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedies and Bodies by Sex Pistols are two of my favourite songs of all time and they're punk as fuck (though Dead Kennedies mix some surf rock into it).  I would never say early Discharge or G.B.H. are metal.  I love Vision of Disorder's Imprint and that album is a true example of metallic hardcore.  It's vibe and style is closer to hardcore than metal.  

The song you picked from the Entombed album was probably one of the less "punky" ones.

Also this one:

NP Disfuneral - Blood Red Tentacle

Old school DM* - Entombed meets Autopsy.

*Or is that crust punk/hardcore/ska/pop punk/postpunk/Oui! Punk/Riot Grrl/*insert favourite punk genre, denying existence of metal punk*

Yeah well I just picked the song that happened to be playing at the time, the album tracks had all been posted in separate videos. And yes it was the slow song, not their punkiest by any means.

I can't really speak to what a lot of punk fans think or do because I've always though of myself primarily as a metalhead that also likes punk. But I liked punk from the very beginning, I went completely ape shit over the first Ramones album when it came out in April of '76 when I was a young lad in 9th grade. Fast, hard and riffy, that's what I wanted from my music and they were the first band I found that were able to deliver that to me on basically every second of every single song on their album. I was in love even though none of my 14/15 year old friends had any idea who they were. Even the mighty Sabbath had more mellow songs than the Ramones. Of course a few years later actual heavy metal finally came along and I was totally on board for that too. Whatever was the heaviest shit of the day (that I knew about) that's what I gravitated to. We used to go into the city a lot in the early 80's for both metal and punk shows, but we were your typical suburban long haired metalhead kids, so punk and the run-down dodgy dives like CB's that hosted punk shows was more of a curiosity for us than a way of life. But there was no denying it was cool (especially live) and we liked it and we started buying the punk records right along with the metal records. But still I've always considered myself a metalhead first and foremost, and I still do.

Looking at it now, I don't think it's so terribly important to make these hard and firm distinctions between metal and punk when all extreme metal by definition is some kind of mixture of the two, be it 50/50 or 95/5. Because it wasn't until you added punk to the mix that heavy metal turned 'extreme' and genres like thrash, black and death sprang up. Sabbath + NWOBHM + hardcore punk = thrash metal. Speed metal was like the precursor to thrash with maybe a little less punk in the mix, a bridge between NWOBHM and thrash if you will. But thrash was the original extreme metal sub-genre, and then all the other extreme metal sub-genres branched off from there. I know you already know this stuff Deadovic, but some others may not. Especially people born in the 80's and after because they didn't live through it.

But anyway it seemed rather silly to me even back then at the time in the mid 80's when some idiot coined the term "crossover thrash" because I figured plain old thrash itself was already a mixture of heavy metal and hardcore punk. Every OG 80's thrash band can tell you what their direct punk influences were and will happily confess their love for Sabbath. Different bands just mixed their metal and punk in differing amounts. If there was too much overt punk influence in a band's sound or if some of the band members dared to not have long hair (that was a thing back then) I guess it must have made some metalheads uncomfortable or something so somebody coined the crossover term to differentiate the thrash bands that had more overt punk in their sound from the ones that didn't, as well as highlighting the punk bands that had heavier more metallic guitar sounds which is what appealed to a lot the metal kids I knew morseso than they'd be into just straight up hardcore.

I'm sure lots of the punk kids thought some of these so called 'crossover' bands were total fucking sellouts. Read through the M-A reviews of bands like Napalm Death and The Exploited (I realize they're not crossover thrash bands but it still applies) and you will see numerous disgruntled punks whinging and whining about how their iconic punk heroes sold-out and abandoned their punk and grind roots to go full-on metal in hopes of commercial success. Annecdotal I know, but it's always seemed to me like it was the metal guys that wanted to deny the existence of any punk in their precious metal, at least I saw that more often than the punk guys were denying there was metal in their punk. The punk guys could see the metal mixing in with their punk, they didn't deny it they just weren't always happy about it.

Funny you should mention GBH and Discharge because while I agree they're not metal bands per se, (although Discharge did eventually release what I would consider to be a metal album or two in the course of their career) they both have a lot of metal in their sounds (compared to most of the other punk bands of their original era) and they were both absolutely massive influences on the birth of thrash metal. I can't overstate how large their influence was. You'd be hard pressed to find a mid 80's thrash band member that didn't have those early GBH and Discharge records. I'm the same age as all those original thrash band founders (give or take a year or two) and everyone I knew had those records just like we all had Sabbath, Motorhead and Priest records.

Being an older guy from NY which seemed to be the epicenter of the crossover thrash movement back then I'm sure I probably have a somewhat different perspective on all this punk/metal stuff than some other people might. East coast thrash generally had a harder, punkier, rougher sound and feel to it than most of their suburban California counterparts. Just like east coast hardcore almost always had a different more violent and menacing vibe than their more laid back west coast rivals. That's just the way we like it out here, no matter what you want to call it. So I'll concede that maybe my perceptions of all this stuff could be skewed a bit from your average non-New Yorker metalheads.

 

Top 10 crossover thrash albums of all time (according to this guy anyway)

 

This is probably my favorite 'crossover' album of all time, followed closely by Life of Dreams and Age of Quarrel.

Straw Dogs - We Are Not Amused 1986, they started life as a hardcore punk band up in Boston called the FU's but you can hear there is quite a bit more metal in their sound by this point in '86. Call it metal or punk or crossover what's the difference, it's just good heavy shit.

 

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12 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Allegaeon. Cannot find an album or even a song on M-A's database by Denver's Allegaeon entitled 'Legacy of Ruin' but I did find their most recent album released on February 25th entitled 'Damnum.'

Gotcha!

No, actually I wrote the wrong album name by mistake. I actually agree with you about both these albums. The ALLEGAEON is clever but so what. The EIGHT BELLS  is kind of nice but so what.

Today an album from a band new to me - WORN MANTLE - Worn Mantle. On Thatguy's admittedly eccentric  rating scale this rates as FUCKING GOOD.

And just to remind you all what a pretentious wanker Thatguy is, NP - ISHII: SŌ-GŌ II - TAKEMITSU: CASSIOPEIA. Music for orchestra and percussion. I'm rather enjoying it.

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2 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Yeah well I just picked the song that happened to be playing at the time, the album tracks had all been posted in separate videos. And yes it was the slow song, not their punkiest by any means.

I can't really speak to what a lot of punk fans think or do because I've always though of myself primarily as a metalhead that also likes punk. But I liked punk from the very beginning, I went completely ape shit over the first Ramones album when it came out in April of '76 when I was a young lad in 9th grade. Fast, hard and riffy, that's what I wanted from my music and they were the first band I found that were able to deliver that to me on basically every second of every single song on their album. I was in love even though none of my 14/15 year old friends had any idea who they were. Even the mighty Sabbath had more mellow songs than the Ramones. Of course a few years later actual heavy metal finally came along and I was totally on board for that too. Whatever was the heaviest shit of the day (that I knew about) that's what I gravitated to. We used to go into the city a lot in the early 80's for both metal and punk shows, but we were your typical suburban long haired metalhead kids, so punk and the run-down dodgy dives like CB's that hosted punk shows was more of a curiosity for us than a way of life. But there was no denying it was cool (especially live) and we liked it and we started buying the punk records right along with the metal records. But still I've always considered myself a metalhead first and foremost, and I still do.

Looking at it now, I don't think it's so terribly important to make these hard and firm distinctions between metal and punk when all extreme metal by definition is some kind of mixture of the two, be it 50/50 or 95/5. Because it wasn't until you added punk to the mix that heavy metal turned 'extreme' and genres like thrash, black and death sprang up. Sabbath + NWOBHM + hardcore punk = thrash metal. Speed metal was like the precursor to thrash with maybe a little less punk in the mix, a bridge between NWOBHM and thrash if you will. But thrash was the original extreme metal sub-genre, and then all the other extreme metal sub-genres branched off from there. I know you already know this stuff Deadovic, but some others may not. Especially people born in the 80's and after because they didn't live through it.

But anyway it seemed rather silly to me even back then at the time in the mid 80's when some idiot coined the term "crossover thrash" because I figured plain old thrash itself was already a mixture of heavy metal and hardcore punk. Every OG 80's thrash band can tell you what their direct punk influences were and will happily confess their love for Sabbath. Different bands just mixed their metal and punk in differing amounts. If there was too much overt punk influence in a band's sound or if some of the band members dared to not have long hair (that was a thing back then) I guess it must have made some metalheads uncomfortable or something so somebody coined the crossover term to differentiate the thrash bands that had more overt punk in their sound from the ones that didn't, as well as highlighting the punk bands that had heavier more metallic guitar sounds which is what appealed to a lot the metal kids I knew morseso than they'd be into just straight up hardcore.

I'm sure lots of the punk kids thought some of these so called 'crossover' bands were total fucking sellouts. Read through the M-A reviews of bands like Napalm Death and The Exploited (I realize they're not crossover thrash bands but it still applies) and you will see numerous disgruntled punks whinging and whining about how their iconic punk heroes sold-out and abandoned their punk and grind roots to go full-on metal in hopes of commercial success. Annecdotal I know, but it's always seemed to me like it was the metal guys that wanted to deny the existence of any punk in their precious metal, at least I saw that more often than the punk guys were denying there was metal in their punk. The punk guys could see the metal mixing in with their punk, they didn't deny it they just weren't always happy about it.

Funny you should mention GBH and Discharge because while I agree they're not metal bands per se, (although Discharge did eventually release what I would consider to be a metal album or two in the course of their career) they both have a lot of metal in their sounds (compared to most of the other punk bands of their original era) and they were both absolutely massive influences on the birth of thrash metal. I can't overstate how large their influence was. You'd be hard pressed to find a mid 80's thrash band member that didn't have those early GBH and Discharge records. I'm the same age as all those original thrash band founders (give or take a year or two) and everyone I knew had those records just like we all had Sabbath, Motorhead and Priest records.

Being an older guy from NY which seemed to be the epicenter of the crossover thrash movement back then I'm sure I probably have a somewhat different perspective on all this punk/metal stuff than some other people might. East coast thrash generally had a harder, punkier, rougher sound and feel to it than most of their suburban California counterparts. Just like east coast hardcore almost always had a different more violent and menacing vibe than their more laid back west coast rivals. That's just the way we like it out here, no matter what you want to call it. So I'll concede that maybe my perceptions of all this stuff could be skewed a bit from your average non-New Yorker metalheads.

 

 

Good post.

 

It seems a lot of the metal-punk feud emerges in late 1970s/early 1980s.  I've read a few books on both metal and punk in Britain and the two did not get along.  Famously Iron Maiden denies any punk influence despite punk being all over their first two albums, 

There would be literal brawls between punk and metal guys and very often the punks themselves who often just brawled for the sake of it. Punks seem to originally have a holier than thou attitude that at times encompassed physical violence that you see in early Norwegian black metal.  Indeed straight edge elements of the Boston hardcore scene would go around beating up drunk people. Washington DC scene was full of violence - read any interview with Cro-Mags front man Harley Flannagan who was arrested for stabbing two of his own bandmembers.

 

The British punks went looking for violence anywhere they could find it - I remember some interviews with British bands from the 1980s who said they got sick of the violence and bullshit in the punk scene.  Playing a guitar solo was apparently reason enough for members of the crowd to try to physically assault the band.  The book is "Contract in Blood: A History of British Thrash Metal" by Ian Glasper.

(Note British rock fans in general used to be psycho - all that infamous throwing of fruit, vegetables and bottles of actual piss at support acts they didn't like at Donnington and other gigs).

 

This quote from below article sums up the punk-metal feud best:

https://www.loudersound.com/features/punk-vs-metal-the-battle-of-los-angeles

 “The thing with the whole metalhead-punk thing was, it just came down to your typical high-school ignorance, where it was just like, you’re not like me, you’re not part of my crowd, I’m going to kick your head in. It’s that cheesy, homo-erotic alpha male shit.”

 

 

Personally I think the best metal usually has a butt ton of punk/hardcore in it and vice versa.  

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28 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

 

Good post.

 

It seems a lot of the metal-punk feud emerges in late 1970s/early 1980s.  I've read a few books on both metal and punk in Britain and the two did not get along.  Famously Iron Maiden denies any punk influence despite punk being all over their first two albums, 

There would be literal brawls between punk and metal guys and very often the punks themselves who often just brawled for the sake of it. Punks seem to originally have a holier than thou attitude that at times encompassed physical violence that you see in early Norwegian black metal.  Indeed straight edge elements of the Boston hardcore scene would go around beating up drunk people. Washington DC scene was full of violence - read any interview with Cro-Mags front man Harley Flannagan who was arrested for stabbing two of his own bandmembers.

 

The British punks went looking for violence anywhere they could find it - I remember some interviews with British bands from the 1980s who said they got sick of the violence and bullshit in the punk scene.  Playing a guitar solo was apparently reason enough for members of the crowd to try to physically assault the band.  The book is "Contract in Blood: A History of British Thrash Metal" by Ian Glasper.

(Note British rock fans in general used to be psycho - all that infamous throwing of fruit, vegetables and bottles of actual piss at support acts they didn't like at Donnington and other gigs).

 

This quote from below article sums up the punk-metal feud best:

https://www.loudersound.com/features/punk-vs-metal-the-battle-of-los-angeles

 “The thing with the whole metalhead-punk thing was, it just came down to your typical high-school ignorance, where it was just like, you’re not like me, you’re not part of my crowd, I’m going to kick your head in. It’s that cheesy, homo-erotic alpha male shit.”

 

 

Personally I think the best metal usually has a butt ton of punk/hardcore in it and vice versa.  

 

Yeah, I mean the two genres of metal and punk go hand in hand for me, heavy music is heavy music and if it makes my head bang and my blood pump then I don't really care what genre it is. But I know a lot of other people have different opinions, some might like one or the other but not necessarily both. But then surely everyone's entitled to their preferences. Just like the way a lot of guys like you and Kuke like death and thrash metal but not black. They're all so closely related with so much overlap I don't see how one could blanketly exclude any one of them just purely on the basis of genre. But we all like what we like and it's not always possible to explain or even to understand why we do or don't like the things we do. And I don't feel it's really even necessary for anyone to justify why they do or don't like some type of music any more than you'd need to justify not liking anchovies or blue cheese or licorice. I like my black metal punky & riffy and my death metal the same way, hence my disdain for all forms of prog. I like a lot of death metal but I can't stand Morbid Angel. Love black metal but I don't like Emperor beyond the debut. It's just my taste and I have to live with it. Doesn't mean someone else is wrong if they like different stuff than I do. That said it's pretty easy to find on the internet people who have all kinds of mistaken and erroneous ideas about things and don't really understand sub-genres or the history behind how some of them got started and how they're related. And that's OK because it keeps me amused. 

As far as the metal vs punk fights in the 80's yeah that shit happened at pretty much every NY show, fights that started in the pit or outside, but I do think it's been blown out of proportion over the years by the metal media. I know none of my friends or I ever got beat up or worried about getting beat up by any skinheads or anything. But I think a lot of the hardcore kids tended to be more urban in origin and some of them were quite used to fighting on the regular just as a matter of course because they had to just to get through life and survive on the streets. Whereas a lot of the metal kids like me were coming in from the suburbs just for the shows and then going back out again afterwards. Most of us long haired suburban sissies were not used to fighting for our lives or fighting just for the fun of fighting or to blow off steam. Our idea of fighting was a more civilized thing, beefs between friends over girls or kids from rival schools or jocks vs nerds bullshit or what have you. Usually alcohol was involved, some words would be exchanged, maybe it'd escalate to the point of some punches being thrown and then it'd quickly be over. The street punk kids from the city were out for blood and would fuck your shit up for real, and we weren't used to that. But like you said a lot of the fighting was just between the punks themselves because they liked to fight. It wasn't all skinheads beating up on long hairs. Of course it's fucking stupid, but when you have heavy aggressive music and a bunch of testosterone filled young dudes all packed into small sweaty clubs that are serving alcohol that can be a recipe for violence when you have two such different groups from different backgrounds coming together like that. I have seen members of the crowd throwing shit and spitting at opening acts more than a few times over the years at various NY shows back in the day, but in most cases it was just a brief isolated thing and it didn't usually get out of hand. Haven't seen anything like that in many years though. Modern day shows do seem to have a lot more security presence.

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Big Country - Steeltown

I'm no Big Country aficionado, but I love this song:

Tall Ships Go

Black Country Communion - s/t - Glen Hughes is the fucking man. The guy seemingly gets better with age. Bonamassa is no scrub either.

California Breed - s/t - further evidence of the awesomeness that is Mr. Hughes

Sweet Tea

Dunsmir - s/t - featuring my favorite lyricist of modern time, the indominatble Neil Fallon. Also a stellar lineup that includes Dave Bone, Brad Davis, and Vinnie Appice.

Blue Murder - s/t - John Sykes, Tony Franklin, and Carmen Appice

And finally, an obviously stitched together video, but highly entertaining. I can never skip this song when it pops up in my feed in any form.

Slayer - Angel of Death live at the Grammys 2022

 

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    • Full length number 19 from overkill certainly makes a splash in the energy stakes, I mean there's some modern thrash bands that are a good two decades younger than Overkill who can only hope to achieve the levels of spunk that New Jersey's finest produce here.  That in itself is an achievement, for a band of Overkill's stature and reputation to be able to still sound relevant four decades into their career is no mean feat.  Even in the albums weaker moments it never gets redundant and the energy levels remain high.  There's a real sense of a band in a state of some renewed vigour, helped in no small part by the addition of Jason Bittner on drums.  The former Flotsam & Jetsam skinsman is nothing short of superb throughout "The Wings of War" and seems to have squeezed a little extra out of the rest of his peers.

      The album kicks of with a great build to opening track "Last Man Standing" and for the first 4 tracks of the album the Overkill crew stomp, bash and groove their way to a solid level of consistency.  The lead work is of particular note and Blitz sounds as sneery and scathing as ever.  The album is well produced and mixed too with all parts of the thrash machine audible as the five piece hammer away at your skull with the usual blend of chugging riffs and infectious anthems.  


      There are weak moments as mentioned but they are more a victim of how good the strong tracks are.  In it's own right "Distortion" is a solid enough - if not slightly varied a journey from the last offering - but it just doesn't stand up well against a "Bat Shit Crazy" or a "Head of a Pin".  As the album draws to a close you get the increasing impression that the last few tracks are rescued really by some great solos and stomping skin work which is a shame because trimming of a couple of tracks may have made this less obvious. 

      4/5
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