Power Trip - Nightmare Logic

And the thrash train just keeps on rolling like it’s 1986. Power Trip’s first album was one I found out about long after it had been released, but it had me pretty excited for Nightmare Logic when it was announced, not because it’s some kind of new, cutting-edge take on thrash metal, but for quite the opposite reasons. With both of their albums now, Power Trip has so excellently paid tribute to the icons of thrash with each half-hour-ish outing by channeling their clear inspiration from bands like Metallica, Kreator, and Slayer into clean, cohesive, but gnarly and energetic thrash, with Nightmare Logic sounding just a tiny bit tighter than Manifest Decimation. Consequently, there really isn’t all that much to say about Nightmare Logic and Power Trip musically that wasn’t already said about their forefathers in the 1980’s. And I’m not saying that to discredit them or to write them off as just imitation artists because I really do like their music. Not that they had any control over this, but they really missed out on the decade in which they would have probably really flourished. But then again, maybe the years of aging and sorting out the good from the legendary in the prime era of thrash is what makes their amalgamation of so many discrete sub-styles of thrash able to work. And even though they came way late to the monstrous rager that thrash was throwing in the 80’s and early 90’s, they are right on time for what seems to be the after-party this year, with thrash going home to get a change of clothes and more booze to bring back to the musical party the whiplash it brought when it had the big four flowing through its veins. And right now, in 2017, Power Trip is certainly one of the cocktails it’s getting drunk from.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more