Time Bomb

Having come out at the same year as Pantera’s “Far Beyond Driven” and Machine Head’s “Burn My Eyes”, this vociferous quarrelsome recording didn’t sound miscalculated at all; on the contrary, it captured the breezes of change quite handsomely, like not many other efforts released around the same time did. The thing is that the band’s swiftly-accumulated with the first two albums fanbase was left to cope with this timely betrayal as this was nothing, or very little, like what they wanted to hear.

I got the band’s debut on the same day with Exhorder’s “Slaughter in the Vatican” and spent a few intensely moshing days at home as both opuses were quite comparable, aggressive angry slabs with brutal skirmishes taking turns with heavier, covertly groovy passages the latter spelling changes across the sky in the future. Well, Exhorder stopped on time as their career was grounded once the equally effective “The Law” came out two years later… however, in the camp here the call of the groove was stronger, and after the lethal “epidemic of violence” that was unleashed upon the world the second time around it kind of made sense for the musicians to try their hands on something that was going to leave the groovy skeleton of their repertoire more exposed.

Without the fast-paced, openly brutal on occasion veneer from the first two instalments almost completely gone, this album may have come as a shock for the more faint-of-heart; on the other hand, those with a more trained ear had by all means detected the groovy vibes from those early recordings, and had probably foreseen the direction the guys were going to take at some stage. I did belong to this latter group, but since I never became the most ardent advocate of the Demolition Hammer cause, I got the album reviewed here quite a few years later. Needless to add, the belated listen I gave it some time in the early-00’s didn’t leave me impressed. As I like the mentioned Pantera and Machine Head recordings, I was probably going to nod around way more enthusiastically if I had tracked it down at that time…

but in the midst of a new old school campaign, one that I had already readily embraced, I simply couldn’t hear much to pronounce this effort a worthy epitaph. Even now, quite a few years down the line, I still struggle to find my way through this thick seismic miasma of angry belligerent groovisms. At least James Reilly’s rending intimidating shouts are firmly in place, leading the loud aggro-show with panache the latter seemingly having everything a 90’s post-thrash opus should; from the “Burn My Eyes” leftover “Under the Table” to the pounding ten-ton hammer (indeed) “Power Struggle”, to the strangely more intricate “Missing: 5/7/89”… everything seems to be fixed at the right spot the guys targeting the 90’s groovy generation by not letting them relax completely, the more aggressive steam-rolling rifforamas on “Mindrot” and especially the headbanging explosion at the end that is the title-tack keeping them on the edge of their comfort zone, also partially compensating for ill-fated covers of new age/wave heroes (Devo in this case) like “Mongoloid”, the band violating this cut nearly beyond recognition, turning it into an abrasive noisy doom/groove parade.

From a conformity point-of-view this album again scores high; in terms of musical proficiency, however, it’s a decisive step back in every department save for the vocal one. It’s not that the band were the most technically-accomplished unit in the world previously, but the tight compact fist-in-the-face approach they had epitomized earlier was by no means a sloucher; here they largely go through the groovy post-thrashy motions already established by other outfits, trying to sound as compliant as possible, only timidly hinting at any more aggressive possibilities like they weren’t laying entire neighbourhoods to dust with their feats of old. At the same time they sound quite confident here, exhibiting this discovered passion of theirs for all things trendy courageously and even arrogantly… quite competently as well with hardly a sense of guilt behind this dense groovy clout: “it’s time to grow up and follow those who know better. Metallica, Overkill, Exodus, Sepultura… shall we go on? Old school naivety is a thing of the past. Let’s start doing the groovy twist and see where it will take us…”.

Well, it took them nowhere as the band were done shortly after this effort here got released. Whether they got ashamed of their newly-acquired emulation stance or they simply got tired of the music industry’s flippancy, the guys terminated the Demolition Hammer saga in the mid-90’s, never to look back… never say never, though, and here they are fully reformed in 2016, having earlier reminded of themselves with the “Necrology: A Complete Anthology” compilation which provided their entire discography to the new millennium audience. How they will decide to entertain it later, that no one can tell with certainty, but it seems to me that the band are generally fonder of less unexpected, timely detonated outbursts… in other words, repetitions of past conformity gestures are out of the question.