Illusions

Whenever I’m thinking about or discussing really fast and truly aggressive old school eighties thrash metal, Sadus must be, will be and shall forever be mentioned. It’s inevitable. ‘Illusions’ is a landmark in brutal thrash metal, influencing bands such as Dead Head and retrobands like Magnetron and Hypnosia. Yet, when I’m being honest about them I really think as a band they haven’t done anything interesting since…. Even though I do like several details and ideas on ‘Swallowed in Black’ from that point on I got more annoyed and bored which each of their albums.

They’ve always been first rate musicians but after two releases these quality musicians started playing second rate material. Their shortcomings in the song writing department became too obvious on ‘A Vision of Misery’ and more recent material. They’re a bunch of good lads, good musicians but they do let their vision blurr the basic key element of writing good music: a ‘song’ obviously isn’t that easy to write. A collection of riffs and tempos put together with some lyrics over it doesn’t imply the concept of a song.

From that perspective I find it quite remarkable that on ‘Illusions’ the band were actually able to write decent songs. The band has gotten pretentious over the years and forgot what made their initial sound and name so classic in the first place: A furious pace, a tight execution and an enormously brutal performance and attitude. And that is exactly what makes ‘Illusions’ such a great album. Imagine Pleasure to Kill being performed in the tightest way possible yet without losing it’s aggression. Even though the riffs and breaks are more ingenious here that on that Neanderthal Kreator release.

Negative aspects? Sure, there are some. The instrumental beginning of ‘Undead’ is obsolete. A lot of breaks and riffs, never to the point or building up to something. You just have to way for a while till the song really begins. The intro to this song is what their third album would sound like in totality: pointless show-off behaviour. The guitar riff at the beginning of ‘Sadus Attack’ is probably the most generic thrash metal riff ever written but fortunately from that point on the song becomes an impressive raging thrasher. And closing track ‘Chemical Exposure’ is a waste of two minutes. Sound like an intro but at the end of the album.

But for the rest, just a great album. Great? Marvellous actually. One of the most brutal and fast thrash metal albums from the eighties. Relentless drumming and the vocals go over the top more than once. I still enjoy it to this day and after more than 20 years it still sounds relevant and aggressive.