Anvil - Pounding the Pavement

Almost four decades as a professional proto-thrash and traditional heavy metal act and Anvil still sound like amateurs chasing Motorhead’s distant coattails.

Anvil have more albums under their belt than some bands have years, and they fall into a rut similar to that of Overkill. They really do make practically the same album each time, which wouldn’t matter so much if they were consistently making high-level retro thrash and speed metal. But the band have spent nearly forty years making cheesy, unoriginal, immaturely tongue-in-cheek hard rock and speed metal (complete with some of the goofiest campy album covers) as if the 80’s thrash scene was still in its infant stages.

“Bitch in the Box” starts the album off with some absurd technophobic tale of what I’m garnering to be an evil GPS navigator, the bitch being the automated voice. Come on now. The first-attempt-level lyrics on “Ego” then solidify the premonition that this is going to be an album that comes with the burden of trying to zone out the lyrics. “Nanook of the North”, a surface-y summarizing narration of the famous documentary the band clearly had just seen, goes over with extra boredom in no way justifying of its six-minute runtime with its corny chants and lethargic, gutless chug.

The album does have a few mild highlights: “Doing What I Want” takes it up a notch with a head-bobbing palm-muted groove and youthful attitude, even if it gets repetitive and if the lyrics read as mildly butthurt by the end, and the album’s title track is a fine demonstration of traditional thrash speed guitar work, and its lack of lyrics is a welcome breath of fresh air. Of course, the following track, “Rock That Shit” had to make up for it in a negative way, as a certifiably corny Lemmy-imitation party song, definitely taking the cake for the album’s worst track.

Oh, that bonus track “Don’t Tell Me”, though, with its stanceless babble about “fake news” reminds me of the much smarter “Intention to Deceive” by Havok, whose modern thrash classic from last year is worth plugging here to at least make this post worthwhile.

I see no need for this album in my library and I can’t see this going on regular rotation in place of the more original Motorhead or even the more energetic Overkill. It’s an album that exemplifies Anvil’s Shakespearean struggle, being so easy to just ignore in favor something else.