Getting the Most Out of Your Extinction

There is often a rallying cry against the idea of labeling tendencies within a given sub-genre of music, largely on the grounds that it doesn't do justice to the respective individual sound of each band. While there may be something to the whole idea of using such an approach as grounds for dismissing certain bands or minimizing their accomplishments, overall the method of creating sub-categories within sub-categories can prove a useful tool not only in discovering great bands that are conducive to one's taste, but also lends a greater understand to the ebb and flow in popularity of certain sounds. This is particularly the case when dealing with the seeming endless sea of short-lived thrash metal acts that popped up between 1987 and 1991, many of them throwbacks or tag-along bands with varying degrees of competency that hailed from areas outside of the New York and Bay Area scenes.

Circa 1990, thrash metal was still a formidable force, but it had largely abandoned its earlier tendencies towards violence and the occult in favor of a more politically conscious approach, culminating in a number of punk-infused green offerings and the early entries of the groove-leaning grey style spearheaded by Exhorder. Naturally there were a few holdouts who clung to the red side of the equation, but in most cases they tended to move more in an overt death metal direction that was a bit different from even mid-80s death thrash after the mold of Possessed and Sepultura (think Demolition Hammer and Morbid Saint). Bucking all of these trends were a small number of bands that got to the scene fairly late and had very limited success, and among the stronger offerings was a one-time 1990 release by an obscure Maryland outfit called Ironchrist, carrying the mouthful of a title Getting The Most Out Of Your Extinction.

From a purely stylistic standpoint, this album is cut from a similar grain to that of the violent and rabid offerings of the mid 80s such as Pleasure To Kill and Darkness Descends, or Sacred Reich's outlier debut Ignorance for a more mainline example. Things tend to go extremely fast, the riff work tends to be frenetic yet not overly technical in the sort of quasi-progressive sense that was becoming increasingly common in the early 90s thanks to the efforts of Watchtower and Toxik, and most of all the vocals are raw and gruff-dominated without being either guttural or overly melodic. The only real outlier elements is the bass work, which gets fairly technical at times (especially on "Neurotica" and "White Plague") and out-shreds much of the handiwork of Anthrax's Frank Bello; and also the guitar tone which has some slight tendencies towards the extremely punchy tone that Scott Burns was introducing to the death metal world at the time.

Overall, the experience that is this album is an energetic and compact one, not all that different from Slayer's Reign In Blood, minus the evil sounding guitar harmonies and banshee wails. Occasionally things mellow out a bit and some clean guitar elements comparable to late 80s Testament comes into the picture, and the instrumental songs "Mechanized Emotions" and "Contusions" get a bit more technical and almost resemble the sort of off-the-cuff riff noodling that early Watchtower was known for, but basically 85% of this album is pure, unfettered aggression that definitely plays a bit more to the red thrash crowd that were the early forerunners of death metal before the Florida scene fully took off. Much of what occurs on here had been done a few years before, but between the raging and occasionally ambitious exterior and the almost crossover-like shortness of each song, Ironchrist managed to carve out an impressive niche for itself that has cult-classic potential all over it.