It’s official. For all the press about Indestructible Noise Command’s accomplishment and influential power back in the day, they now have more full albums post-reunion than in their original iteration. Which is significant because it means the band is living up to their commitment from so many years ago of resuming their career once the marketplace make it possible to do so without the complicating machinations of a major record label.
The interesting twist here is that “Terrible Things,” this shiny, new compendium of classic thrash, bears more resemblance to the albums before the hiatus than it does to the ones recently.
The album sees the band return to thrash in its truest sense – a snarled vocal, a shredded guitar riff, a pulse-pounding drive that inspires the listener to tear their furniture apart and run up and down the street screaming until a concerned neighbor summons the local constables.
There’re some conscious choices being made by the band here. In making what was old new again, the band has sacrificed the platforms that made “Heaven Sent… …Hellbound” and “Black Hearse Serenade” stand out from so many of their competitors.
That doesn’t mean that “Terrible Things” comes as a pale echo from three decades ago, far from it. What it does mean is that gone are the ravine-deep groovy riffs of their reinvention, and also gone is vocalist Dennis Gergely’s stylings in the vein of Phil Anselmo. The latter of these is a more than fair trade – Phil and his ilk have their place and their legacy, but that style only goes so far, and wouldn’t have worked as well for this effort.
As for the former, the value of the tradeoff is really contingent on the listener’s preference. Erik Barath and Tony Fabrizi are equally at home as a guitar tandem working in this idiom as they were in crafting the deep undulations that previous albums required. Their craft comes with the confidence of having played together for the majority of their respective lives. From the album’s thumping opener “Fist Go Rek” to the more measured closure of “Devil of Hearts,” the pair creates a symphony of thrash brilliance.
As it happens, the mastery displayed by the duo is one of the two things that sets Indestructible Noise Command apart from their modern contemporaries, and if we’re being honest, disciples. There are few bands in the world of thrash who can contend with the level of guitar virtuosity that these two bring to the table on a track by track basis. Their blend of speed and craft, as evidenced in the solo of…oh, just pick one…”Declaration” is the kind of lost art that we haven’t really seen since Lazarus A.D and recalls the original, untamed days of Slayer.
The second thing that separates INC is their ability to flip the switch and instantly go big on their presentation. This was something “Heaven Sent… …Hellbound” did with great success, and we see the seeds of that here as well. The opening build of “Nemesis” is a tremendous example of the way in which even as straight-ahead a genre as thrash can set a scene and create an atmosphere.
For all that, the album’s jewel is actually the second track, “Identifier.” It’s possessed of a simple, wide-open riff that doesn’t evolve into something more until Gergely’s vocals, of all things, set the pace for the entire track. The lyrics are deliriously random and better for the fact, so when the song finally breaks, the listener can’t help but start to smile. The open space and throaty bassline come together to set the table for the Judas Priest-esque galloping guitar solo that follows. This is the album’s high-water mark.
We’ve heaped well-deserved praise to this point, but there are some cautionary notes worth mentioning. There are choruses that are disjointed to the point of being distracting, including “Unscathed” and even the title track. In these moments, the attempt to change the pace or shift the focus of a song breaks too far from the established rhythm and loses momentum. Also, as ever with a thrash album, the reality is that there will be songs that just don’t work as well, and “Salmonella” isn’t a bad track per se, but it’s easily skippable when weighed against the album’s other triumphs.
In the grand scheme, those are relatively minor and ultimately forgivable transgressions. “Terrible Things” is an excellent return to form from a band who is proving with each effort that they are still vital and relevant in their chosen genre. This album, when paired with the two that came before it, also cements the band’s versatility, which means the horizon is still an intriguing prospect; INC, after so many years, is still leaving us with the idea that we haven’t seen everything they can do yet. In terms of pure thrash, INC stands at the forefront with Power Trip in leading the genre into the next age. In fact, they should tour together. Let’s make that happen.
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