...in the Name of Thrash Metal

In recent times, my progressively enforcing opinion is that modern thrash metal bands can't find a road to follow all together. For every desperate attempt to disprove the common idea that the genre is dead (Vektor), there are many other bands which limit themselves to give their personal twist to the 'classic' sound (Lich King, Evile), and nearly as many others that sound like they're inevitably stuck in the '80s (Suicidal Angels, Impalers). With regards to the latter category, it's by far the most tricky situation, given the high risk of creating anachronistic stuff that feels like thirty-something years too late. While this doesn't really pop up on higher profile bands like the ones I mentioned, you can be assured that beneath the surface lie a plethora of entities which are quite comfortable at releasing stuff comparable to those third-rate acts of those revered years (At War, Vectom, Hallows Eve). They didn't sound that good back then, but as 21st-century stuff they would sound even much worse. I had the questionable honor of listening to and reviewing Thrash or Die's debut Poser Holocaust, which suffered from these same problems, coupled with one of the most annoying voices I had ever heard. Back then, I deemed it the unquestionable nadir of my favourite genre. So, it's not a surprise I was struck by the assertion that something could be even worse...

Enter Extreme Attack, from Ecuador, and their debut ...in the Name of Thrash Metal.

In retrospect, Poser Holocaust could be given the mitigation of being a joke – albeit not a particularly funny one – but it still wasn't worth buying it from the bargain bin of your usual retailer. I still can't picture anybody who bought it thinking it was a good deal, but alas – I must have a too sophisticated sense of humour... or I like having CDs that sound good in my collection. And since the now-disappeared previous reviewer and compatriot Hellish_Torture sketched a comparison between these two bands, now the time has come for the most awaited event of the year: we're finally going to find the absolute bottom of the barrel of the entire thrash metal genre. The masterpiece in sucking all that is beautiful in our beloved genre dry. Let's see.

It would not be thrash if we didn't start from the guitars. Assuming this is more 'thrash' than 'trash'... well, I'm not a guitarist, far from it actually (excluding that Guitar Hero session from time to time), but I guess that when you consistently try to take as much as possible from the 'Thrash riffs 101' book, you'll end up with a couple of enjoyable riffs, by statistics. It's the broken clock rule. Obviously in both cases the axemen are careful not to do more than playing 2/3 standard riffs which had probably been done in a thousand variations many years before, so this would be a draw. Solos-wise, the situation doesn't improve that much, since guitarist Renata Pacheco makes her male counterpart Mario Cianci seem a virtuoso by churning out some audacious note progressions (e.g. on the closer) which even Mille Petrozza and Kerry King would deem too cacophonous to be put on tape. Just let that sink in. Speaking of the closer, which I omit the amazingly creative title of because I feel I'm already going to repeat those words ad nauseam in this review, it's a total rip-off of 'Tormentor' by Kreator, and that's frankly unacceptable. With all due respect, you are not playing a riff inspired by a less-known song by Assassin or Darkness, but you're plagiarizing HALF a song by THE most famous German band worldwide. Something like this is dreadful even for the low standards of ...in the Name of Thrash Metal. ToD get this round.

The drums. Well, the drummer nearly forced me to raise the rating, because his performance is light years ahead in terms of... well, everything compared to ToD's lifeless Darth Vodka. The man is Andree Aguilar, who plays also in a handful of death metal bands from Ecuador (kinda reminds me of those small towns like mine, where there are no more than one or two guys who can play drums, so they're in every band of the town), under the stage name of 'Insane Blast Beat', and he's even capable of doing – you may have guessed – blast-beats, so here he's practically wasted. It's like he's trying to revive a long dead and decomposed man with a defibrillator: if the rest was at least on par (or the man still breathing), it would have worked. He's still pretty repetitive in his playing, and the sterile production gives him no justice, but at least he seems the only one with a bit of energy. Anyway, he's out of the band... maybe it was too good for Extreme Attack. EA get this round.

The vocals. I'll put it bluntly. This guy and Dr. Fukk are really the two worst vocalists I've EVER heard. Choosing the 'best' between those two is an experience comparable only to a situation where you have to decide whether you'd want to die eaten alive by rats, or pierced slowly in your non-vital organs by katanas: in both cases you're going to die, and to die very, very painfully, so you struggle to find a little something that could make you choose one of them. In this case, I'd begrudgingly choose Dr. Fukk, because at least his voice can be traced back to some cult vocalists like Zetro or Blitz, even if parodied way beyond the point of no return, and you could maybe pick up one or two songs on the debut where he doesn't sound so bad to urge you to destroy your speakers/headphones. This Patricio Viveros is laughable at best, embarrassing at worst. I'd literally bury my head underground if somebody caught me listening to these horrible attempts at... speaking clichés with a slight sense of rhythm and questionable English accent, coupled with so many 'yaow's that'll make you yearn to be listening to the worst James Hetfield instead? Whether you may or may not like internet slang, it's just... cringe, I cannot think of a better word to define it (though 'awful', 'hideous' and every other synonym you can think of are all good choices). I wonder how he can go outside and tell people 'Hey, listen, folks, that's me singing in this absolutely dead serious and not parody metal band!', seriously, I'm jealous of his self-esteem. ToD sucks a little tiny bit less in this round.

The bass. You can choose whether this paragraph disappeared into a passage for another dimension, was stolen, or simply there's nothing to speak about because there's nothing to hear in both cases. Or better, in the case of Extreme Attack, an audible bass with a single guitar is not a victory. Draw.

Bonus paragraph: the artwork. Now I don't think it's awful, it's incredibly cliché, that's for sure, but it couldn't have been otherwise... the style of drawing is at least nice, but the comic sans used for the title is atrocious. Still, a bonus point for Extreme Attack, for what it's worth.

Now, best songs? Ha! Don't make me laugh. Distinguishing between songs is harder than draining the Pacific Ocean using a colander (thankfully this also means there are no midpaced songs... God knows what abominations they would have created), and the Kreator rip-off otherwise called the closer of this album puts the final nail in the coffin of ...in the Name of Thrash Metal. Even the introduction manages to be incredibly unoriginal in only one minute (just think of the first minute of Cranium's Speed Metal Slaughter, but without the fun and the chainsaws). Yes folks, this is really the lowest you can go if you want to play thrash metal. I'm not going to raise the rating of my review for Poser Holocaust because I still feel that it's unacceptable by modern standards, but if compared with something which manages to be even worse at times, it's a 0% that has a bit more value than this. Not a huge accomplishment, but whatever.

Admittedly ToD got really better on their sophomore Melting Your Skull, which I've already praised for its musical skills (but what can you expect since they recruited Alex Marquez and Ryan Taylor for it?) which nearly managed to catch my attention, if it weren't inevitably kidnapped, drawn and quartered by Dr. Fukk's rubber duck-voice. Unfortunately, since by contrast EA kicked out their only standout member (envy?), that's something I'm not expecting to see from them, also judging by their latest EP... if in five years they're still sounding the same, I guess there has to be something wrong. Avoid this like the plague, or go search it and laugh at it, if you're in dire need of proofs that there are worse bands than yours. It works.