Games of Joy... Games of War!

This formation has ties to two other Brazilian outfits, Jailor and Juggernaut, as members of all three teams have been seen rotating throughout the line-ups. Consequently, their styles are not too dissimilar to each other the base being the good old thrash, the way we know it from the works of the German Holy Three (Kreator, Sodom, Destruction), above all, spiced with a more or less prominent death/Death presence. The band under scrutiny here can be considered the most thrash-fixated of the lot their debut an explosive slab of intense, also quite technically-charged at times, classic thrash which even went beyond the more complex escapades of early-90’s Kreator, the main target for worship, with the casual more brutal deathy allusion.

A lengthy hiatus, the 2008 EP notwithstanding, was interrupted by the arrival of the album reviewed here which shows the band having not lost much from their previous retro thrash vigour. Classic Kreator are again the closest soundalike here as evident from the bombastic “Rage is My Food, Hate Is My Guide”, a superb speedy technical shredder that could have been an easy highlight on “Extreme Aggression”. “Trivial Pieces of Meat” is already a complex progressiver with creepy doomy overtones the prevalent sudbued, still quite technical, riffage marching with grim determination carved by sudden fast-paced strokes. A true masterpiece of thought-put, elaborate metal, this cut is followed by “Hate! Is What I Feel!”, a more immediate blitzkrieg shredder that forms a triptych with the title-track and “How to Explain” both sustained in the same super-speedy uncompromising fashion.

“Silence … Around Me” is a contrasting conglomerate of slow, fast-paced, and technical extremes all sides merging into one another until the blast-beating exit scares everyone away. “Untiring Torturer” goes further back into the Kreator legacy reminding of “Pleasure to Kill”’s unbridled brutality with a superb quiet mid-section; and “Scars” remains on German soil, but nodding towards the speed metal brotherhood (think Warrant, early Helloween, Vectom). Diversity becomes the name of the game in the second half for the sake of the more complex, more technical ways of expression which are also missing from “Fuck Off!”, another hyper-speedy Germanic exploit, but are brought to the fullest on “Cowardly Terror”, a more carefully plotted progressive thrasher in various moods and tempos, with a couple of less bridled explosions dispersed throughout.

The focus on a more linear, less complicated approach in the second half may even be the better option to some, but it creates some kind of unevenness which the band fail to justify fully having in mind the more coherent layout of the debut and the full grip exercised on the more elaborate tools of execution at the beginning. There’s by no means lack of aggression on the longer material where the more technical moments even help accentuate the bouts of less tamed surges whenever the latter arrive, making the stripped-down no-bars-held skirmishes applied later not really necessary.

Well, it’s the good old thrash we’re talking about, first and foremost, and in this train of thought our friends don’t disappoint whether delivering it in a more complex or a more conventional manner. The headbangers will rejoice all over, and their contagious jump-arounds will carry the others away, some happy and fulfilled, others angry and belligerent, but all into the pit with reckless abandon.