My Friend Lonely

From the znow… sorry, snow white hills of Chicago we had an avalanche earlier in the 80’s, an Act of God no more no less, which was a lot of fun to be buried under… a truly awesome classic speed/thrash avalanche that didn’t last long, unfortunately, largely cause the diva and former Sentinel Beast Debbie Gunn decided to quit this camp in order to prick the thick ice layer with Ice Age, and to also add some potent brutality to the oncoming groovy wave with Brutal Groove in the early-90’s.

The others carried on, though, finding shelter in this temple here, against the pulverizing numetal cyclone, and resisted to it admirably with the first instalment “I Hate Therefore I Am”, a nice tribute to the Bay-Area. Three years later the shelter/temple was partly overtaken by the invading aggro/grooves, the several pricks in the walls first evident on the “Building Errors in the Machine” EP.

Most of the tracks from the EP are featured on the album reviewed here, and they’re the ones that bring some life into this recording, like the vivid leftover from the debut “Hate Makes Hate”, the stomping pulverizing “Down the Drain”, the sprightly semi-technical headbanger “Killing Floor”… the main question regarding those is why they’ve been included here, being familiar and all. The new singer Sonny de Luca, who replaced the departed Zhowhite remnant Brian Troch, is a forceful angry shouter, not hiding his fascination with both Phil Anselmo (Pantera) and Rob Flynn (Machine head), and even if he was supervising a wholesome nod at the classic thrash heritage all the way, there’d still be quite a few listeners who would be semi-whispering “modern metal” due to his openly confrontational performance, although in his defence one has to admit that he does pull out a more pronounced emotional croon on the more laid-back moments. And the modern metal tunes do come, the new material that is, the title-track a clumsy semi-balladic groover; “Comfortably Superficial” an uncomfortably loyal numetal dirge; and “Time Heals All” a confused/confusing soulful groove/blues hybrid.

On the plus side, these three numbers don't stick as prominently, submerged in the loftier rest, also thanks to de Lucca’s vociferous presence, but at the same time the purpose of their presence is beyond clear: the band have voted to give their (un)fair share to the bustling numetal movement, besieging those intentions with echoes of their classic past, trying to bind the two currents. Not very convincingly, though, as the boosted modern production is another nod in favour of the trendy musicalities, the guys surely on the road to phasing out their old school predilections, most likely smacking a full-on tribute to father groove on their next instalment. Again, it might have sounded a tad superior than the efforts of the hordes of aggro-practitioners swarming the scene at the time, but based on the material offered here one would definitely do better than betting blindly on this team.

All bets scrapped very shortly after this opus’ release, the band folding amicably, obviously disillusioned with the less demanding musical canvas, one that simply couldn’t accommodate their more proficient vistas. Full-time servants to the numetal fad they didn’t become, departing from this temple, not fearing any impending cyclones anymore… some people say they’ve seen some of them climbing the snow white mountains again, their initial much safer and more productive haven. Only God knows when they’ll decide to act again with all the gunn… sorry, guns blazing.

To be a fly on the wall during the closing days of the first age of thrash metal in the recording industry's executive offices, would be a highly educational encounter for any naive newcomer to the style about 25 years after the fact. Even for the tail-end of Generation X who found themselves bystanders during the early to mid 1990s to this seemingly overnight change, the explanation of this turn of events is usually a mixture of cop-outs and half-truths that was ultimately believed and greeted with an indifferent shrug. The reality is likely a lot closer to a band of up and comers filing into the label president's office, and upon their demo being heard, being asked if they can tone it down a bit, don some dingy flannel attire and get their vocalist to put a bit more yarl in his pronunciation. Upon being asked why, most tycoons who inspired this hypothetical amalgam would have brazenly answered that music comes second after the almighty dollar, though a small handful may have been intellectually dishonest enough to suggest that what they were pushing was compelling and inspired art. Those who stuck to their guns were left out in the cold, and those who changed fared little better with maybe a few exceptions.

One of the forgotten casualties of this time of "change" was the Chicago-based thrash machine Cyclone Temple that had been toiling in the underground under the moniker Znöwhite and came into prominence just prior to the industry-orchestrated shift in trends, which subsequently found them relegated to the proverbial wilderness not long after their seminal debut I Hate Therefore I Am hit the market. In more ways than one, they were a creature of their time, playing into a number of early 1990s sensibilities from their image, a more soulful and smokey vocal character in keeping with the characteristic sound typified in Layne Staley and John Bush, and a more measured approach to the riff-based madness of the thrash style that was comparable to Anthrax's Persistence Of Time and Heathen's Victims Of Deception. Following the collapse of Combat Records and a short stint with Progressive International, a late holdout label that was still supporting metal bands on the west coast, a final defiant stride for relevance was put forth by this band independently that stands as a sort of mid-90s consolation prize for the American thrash scene, appropriately titled My Friend Lonely.

Though donning an album cover that goes heavy on the cringe (a photo of a ventriloquist dummy years before Jeff Dunham resurrected said dead art form) that would suggest a groove-infused bomb reminiscent of Sacred Reich's Independent or Machine Head's debut dud, the contents are of a notably higher caliber. Most of it is reworked material from the previous Building Errors In The Machine EP that exhibits a production quality more becoming of a group of songs that were quite well realized by early 90s Bay Area standards, but have also been stripped of some needed ancillary elements that amounts in a one step forward, one step back result. Many an old guard thrash purist has raked former vocalist and neophyte Marco Salinas over the coals for allegedly sounding like a cheap James Hetfield knockoff, but his gritty yells definitely worked far better on the older versions of "Hate Makes Hate" and "Down The Drain" than the over-exaggerated yarl groan and sloppy attempt at soulful vocals heard out of ex-Enchanter vocalist Sonny DeLuca. It's not a total train wreck, as these songs are far more riff-driven than vocally centered, but the overreaching hybrid of Rind and Anselmo on display here doesn't work as well, and is kind of a disappointment given the solid Chuck Billy emulation DeLuca brought to his former band's 1989 demo.

All that being said, the stylistic proclivities of the vocals are not the only pollutant to seep into the equation here, though mercifully the lackluster musical points are largely relegated to the newer material featured here. After leaving a fairly strong impression with two cookers from the previous recording, this lost album's title song "My Friend Lonely" throws the flow off considerably with a quirky reggae intro that segues into what can be best described as a groove/thrash ballad where the rhythm section has some jazzy fun but the guitar just sort of plods and the vocals lay on the yarls so thickly that even the Sound Of White Noise incarnation of John Bush would call it overkill. Things recover a bit with another dual helping of material from the '93 EP, with the only downside being that good old Reverend Cleophus doesn't make an appearance at the end of "Drug Of The Masses", and then a newer song actually manages to avoid the groove trap. "Comfortably Superficial" starts off in an oddball jazzy ballad rut that's somewhat comparable to something Forced Entry dabbled with in the early 90s, but then lays on some reasonably punchy mid-paced thrashing. Things close on a more lackluster note with "Time Heals All", which is essentially a less overtly Alice In Chains oriented take on the slower paced Sound Of White Noise half-thrash formula; not a terrible song, but pretty repetitive and about a minute longer than it needs to be.

The best way to look at this album is as something of a historical oddity, albeit one that is mostly listenable and not without a few bright spots that shine far brighter than anything that was hitting the shelves in 1994. When this album is on point, it basically functions as a finalized version relative to the demo-like quality of Building Errors In The Machine, but one can't help but see some glaring flaws in the overall presentation that could have been redressed with a few changes, though they would likely have made this album even less accessible to the masses of asses who were gobbling down Burn My Eyes and Far Beyond Driven like they were Cool Ranch Doritos. If they'd kept Salinas in the fold and given his voice the production treatment that DeLuca received here, if they had shaved about 70 seconds off of "Time Heals All" and dropped "My Friend Lonely" for a version of "The Law Of Relativity" that didn't have all the rapped rubbish on it, this could have been a worthy, albeit less powerful follow up to I Hate Therefore I Am. All the same, it is a listenable album, and a cut above the rest for the time within the bounds of the continental United States. Thanks to the renewed interest in thrash metal that has been kindled over the past 15 years, Divebomb Records reissued this album along with the previous LP in 2012, a worthy pickup for any old school thrash metal junkie wanting to hear a diamond in the mid-90s rough.

Having already had my expectations castrated by the band's debut I Hate Therefore I Am, and then the liberated, necrotic organs of my sex trampled upon the grass by the ensuing Building Errors in the Machine EP, I had absolutely no faith in Cyclone Temple whatsoever. That they even managed to release a second full-length is nothing short of a miracle, but there's a catch. The ill-titled My Friend Lonely is merely a re-recording of the ENTIRE Building Errors in the Machine EP, with a few extra tracks added, on a third label. Complete with one of the most retarded album covers I've ever seen in 35 years on this Earth, this 'new' material was surely going to win back audiences far and wide to the band's brand of street thrash and one of the most mediocre James Hetfield parodies in history.

Okay, so maybe not. I'll give Cyclone Temple that the newly recorded versions of "Hate Makes Hate", "Down the Drain", "Me, Myself and I", "Drug of the Masses" and "Killing Floor" at least benefit from a superior studio mix here, which almost compares with the production quality of the debut, at least running flush with what the few fans of that would have expected on a true follow-up. Perhaps De Lucia heard his own voice on the prior recordings, because he actually dials back the Billy/Hetfield style and sounds a little more like Sacred Reich's Phil Rind on several of the tracks like "Down the Drain". It makes the tracks slightly more tolerable, but the music itself isn't any better.

There are a trio of actual new tracks on the album, the first of which is "My Friend Lonely". The intro begins with a reggae lick, totally unnecessary, but hey, this is the fuckin' 90s man, we gotta branch out if we're to survive! Well, this might always have worked for the Bad Brains or 24-7 Spyz, but it's thankfully short here. The rest of the song sucks, because the riffs are just boring Prong-like chugging and horrible, emotional vocals that are all over the place, with some truly awkward lyrics and delivery in the chorus. When the guy gets all gritty and bluesy in the later verse, try to not laugh at how pathetic it becomes. "Comfortably Superficial" does feature a few half-decent riffs in there, with a nice melodic tone to the chugging, but the vocals suck and spoil the rest. The lead-in riff to the final new original, "Time Heals All" reminds me of a chugged out mutation to the intro in Flotsam & Jetsam's "No Place for Disgrace", and then the song lapses into groovy bass and De Lucia's dirty, digging Soul voice. It's probably the worst of the three, and the band breaking out their rap metal track "The Law of Relativity" once more as a 'hidden' attachment was probably not going to help matters much.

Hearing My Friend Lonely is like seeing a great man you once knew, deep in his cups and drunk out of his liver and kidneys at the seediest local dive you can find. How has he fallen this far? Should you offer him some change for a cup of coffee? Drive him over to a local rehab? End his misery with a slash of a pocket knife, quick clean getaway and a mock concern call to the EMTs? My solution for us to help Cyclone Temple is to go out and gather up every copy of this disc in existence, and commit it to an incinerator. This record absolutely fucking blows, and it's no wonder at all that the band were not going to outlive it for very long. The fact that sounds like rap and reggae were appearing here, even briefly, is proof positive that the band were succumbing to the outside pressure of the 90s cultural hodgepodge, and perhaps they would have been better served by starting another new band to explore these options. Not that this outfit was ever really worth saving, mind you, they'd been weak from the start, but compared to what is on this disc, even I Hate Therefore I Am seems like a job well done. The recording of these tracks may sound better than the EP, but the vocals are actually even worse since they've become clearer. The newer songs are tripe and this record is a complete waste of effort and time.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

In 1989, after the band Znowhite disbanded, Greg Fulton [guitars and song writer], Scott Schafer [bass] and John Slattery [drums] formed Cyclone Temple which in my opinion had a short but interesting carrier. This is their second album which came out in 1994, after the Thrash scene already died and the Grunge Rock conquered over the world. This album sounds much different from most of the Old-School Thrash. In this case, the vocalist is the leader, not the riffs which usually being the main actor in Thrash Metal, and the vocals only supports it.

All the songs here were written by the guitarist Greg Fulton. In my opinion it's a very high effort for one man to write such an awesome album by himself. He wrote all these groovy melodies and the sharp lyrics by himself, and it's pretty noticeable that he worked much more on the melodies than the riffs. The riffs aren't dominant and the vocals are much more intense, I'm pretty sure that he first wrote the lyrics and melodies and only later wrote the riffs and solos [which played very rarely in this album, I don't remember that I heard more than three or four leads in all that album] only for backing up the vocals. This is actually very outstanding for me because most of the Thrash albums I heard [and I heard a lot] were held mostly by the riffs, this is what makes this album feel maybe a little bit more mainstreamed, though the band were always in the underground.

The vocalist Sonny De Lucia sounds like Philip Anselmo [Pantera] but softer.
He fits very well the melodies which sounds like a pure combination between Grunge Rock and Thrash Metal [Down The Drain is the best example for that].
There are some experimental sections here and there which chilling out a bit the heavy perception of this album and some Hardcore based vocals [especially in the catchy Drug Of The Masses] which sounds groovy and reminds me Pantera from the 'Cowboys From Hell' era. All in all the vocals are more intense than most of the Thrash albums out there, because here the vocalist is really singing with tunes and not reciting the lyrics to fit well the riffs.

This album contains 5 songs from the former EP and 3 fillers which doesn't really keep on interest but has some good moments . Whats makes this album worthy if you don't have their EP is that here they got a new and better vocalist, and better production.

Well, it isn't the regular Thrash album because it combines [in a good way] some other styles into it [Hardcore, a bit Grunge Rock and maybe a bit Groove metal] and it isn't based on the guitar riffs, so if you are looking for some catchy and kicking asses riffs, you won't find much here because as I said, it's pretty clear that the vocals are the lead theme. Don't think this album doesn't sounds like Thrash and that it's a poor imitation for it. This album is a really kicking ass Thrash which doesn't going too far away from the old school style of Thrash and if you looking for something a BIT different than the regular formula- you must get this awesome album.