Green

Yeah, that one was a dud. One that few people noticed at the time it came out; first, cause it was released by a band who never really made it to the very upper echelons of the metal roster; very unjustly mind you... and second cause everyone was shooting duds left and right at the time. Yep, it was a dud time the mid-90’s, to the point that if there was someone who wanted to break the dud supply with something more visionary and creative, he would have been instantly targeted by the social consciousness, then squashed, stultified and ultimately stampeded by it.

Nah, our Bay-Area heroes wanted no trouble with the groovy authorities who let them live after the adaptational but cool “Distortion”, showing the band on the apt side of this transformation campaign alongside Anthrax, Kreator, Coroner... and it did make sense, if you think of it, this testing of nu… sorry, new waters, with each of these outfits crossing the magnum opus off their lists with the immediate predecessors, Forbidden doing this with the exceptional “Twisted into Form”.

The thing is that three years later the form gets twisted in most predictable ways, with very few if at all lining up to check what the final result has amounted to. Although hardly anyone was expecting Russ Anderson and Co. to rise and produce another prog-thrash masterpiece in the midst of the numetal fever, the album reviewed here is such a banal derivative fare that one would struggle to find even a single note to make an allusion to the band’s first two. There’s still a plus side to this predictable groovy post-thrash parade, the title-track and “Phat”, two hectic nervy numbers played back-to-back at the beginning, misleading everyone with their on-the-verge-of-actual-thrash demeanour, the latter cast aside by the unpardonably clumsy dragger “Turns to Rage”, with some rage indeed popping up on “Face Down Heroes”, but this is a pasture for panteras and machine heads, the nu kids on the block, where the colour green isn’t a verdant connotation anymore. Noisy thrashcore energizers (“Over the Middle”), more groovy rehashes (“Kanaworms”), and cumbersome bluesy/doomy blanks (“Blank”) complete the not very appealing picture, Russ Anderson shouting his lungs out cantankerously, trying his best to sound as unrecognizable as possible.

And the guys do succeed, to twist themselves into a form alienated to the max from their early feats, compromising creativity, originality and innovation for… nothing really, as by 1997 whatever surprises could have been produced within the numetal roster were already a done deal. But the thing is that the band don't even remotely try to produce anything surprising: this is so commonplace that could pass for the work of multiple other practitioners grooving in the neighbourhood at the time, both music and vocal-wise. What’s probably even more hurtful is that the album does sound at times like the musicians were taking this exercise seriously, like they really wanted to carve a niche for themselves on the wall of nu metal… and for that reason alone this effort fares less than the overtly goofy, completely unpretentious “Stomp 442” of their colleagues Anthrax, or the entirely-new-direction-bound loading/reloading Metallica sagas.

Yep, I was quite right about not bothering with this slab for a really long time… but it was green, for crying out loud… it wasn’t like pink… or velvet. A patch of green smacked in the midst of a still notorious groove/aggro campaign; one which even a whole omega wave found it hard to erase fully from the annals of music. But no shame, and no guilt please… cause I’m pretty sure Anderson and Co. have long since equipped themselves with the ultimate back-to-the-roots weapon: the alpha wave. Whenever…