Enter the Grave

Evile is the epitome of the thrash revival, in the sense that they full embrace and amplify every single cliché associated with the original 80s scene with the fewest modern twists to speak of. This eventuality is 100% unavoidable given the fact that this band began as a tribute band and, for all intents and purposes, remains one to this day in spite of now creating their own material. Perhaps therein lay the reason for the backlash against “Enter The Grave”; it’s an album that represents everything that Metallica should be sounding like right now, and also what the rest of the thrash scene should have been doing in the underground during the 90s rather than pandering to the grunge and nu-metal crazes that came and went like a pair of soiled shorts.

But metal scene socio-political rhetoric aside, there’s nothing to complain about an album like this one, as it perfectly embodies all essential elements of the spirit of thrash. Be it your typical futuristic apocalyptic storytelling along the lines of “The Terminator” series, or just the usual mishmashes of psychotic episodes and horrific encounters that have defined the style since 1983, this is an album that keeps to the established orthodoxy while managing to keep things pretty fresh in a tried and true formula. It has the speed and fury of “Kill Em’ All” and “Show No Mercy”, but also the attitude and gusto of “Horrorscope” and the slightly progressive tendencies of “The New Order”. In fact, I would argue that this is among the better answers to Metallica that has been put forth since Testament, while being maybe slightly more derivative than the late 80s Bay Area crew led by Chuck Billy were at their inception.

Perhaps the greatest draw of this band is their ability to tap a number of differing sources from the 80s scene, though mostly localized to the Bay Area style, while still maintaining this consistent tendency of embodying their Metallica tribute band past. The opener “Enter The Grave” and the up tempo crusher “Killer From The Deep” take on a heavily Metallica oriented flavor, reminding of the faster and more thrashing elements of “…And Justice For All” without the glaring production flaws. “Man Against Machine” takes on more of a creepy, “The New Order” feel with a dissonant clean guitar intro that all but paints an image of fallen humanity, followed by a gradual build up to an eventual explosion of speed riffs and gritty shouts that sounds half Slayer, half Annihilator.

The basic feel of this entire album is as a highly ambitious yet uniquely streamlined recap of just about every pure thrash experiment that occurred between 1983 and 1991, though focusing the most on the middle period when the truly crippling elements that were Death Angel, Heathen and Vio-Lence began to push the envelope in terms of how fast and how heavy the style could be. The outliers in this are “Thrasher” which opts for an old school 1983 Metallica sound with its simplistic gallops and celebratory mood of bodies flailing in the pit, and the longwinded “We Who Are About To Die” which goes for an all out “…And Justice For All” mixture of slow, medium and fast, with maybe a slight helping of that same Testament flavored atmospherics (particularly at the beginning) that were encountered on “Man Against Machine”.

This is something that any thrash metal fan should be able to appreciate, but it’s particularly geared towards people who would like to see more of what Metallica was doing before the 90s and don’t like it done half-assed the way Trivium and other metalcore pukes have been. Granted, those who think that thrash metal ran its course and should be left in the graveyard of metal history will probably hate this album more than any other revivalist work of late given that it makes zero attempts at expanding beyond what has already been done. Speaking for myself, I’m fine with thrash metal being in the graveyard provided that bands like Evile continue to invite me for another session 6 feet under like this one.