Strappado

I've heard the band Slaughter be called a Thrash Gem, however I think there was a mistake. The only album by Slaughter is Strappado. They would pull a kind of Sex Pistols thing where they re-release the same album a hundred times.

If you ever wanted to hear bad classic thrash this is the album to find it. Personally, I thought it never existed and that it was all good. I enjoy bands like Razor, Exciter, Vio-lence, Kreator, Destruction, and the like. They are good thrash bands so I figure that I wouldn't find a bad classic thrash band until I came up Strappado by Slaughter.

Let's get started with the lyrics. The lyrics are weak and rather childish. "Tyrant of Hell" suffers some of the worst thrash lyrics around. "Tyrant of Hell- torturing you slow, Tyrant of hell- extracting what you know, Tyrant of hell- you're on the brink of doom, Tyrant of hell- is coming for you soon". The lyrics are cheesy, weak, and they sound rushed or not well thought out. They seemed to care about what sounded "extreme" or "shocking" and not good. "Incinerator" suffers this too with "They fed upon semen, The government's a demon" just that alone is terrible. It's a bad rhyme with bad lyrics. In "Shadow of Death" they try to be tough with an intro of "One, Two, Fuck You". How bland, mediocre, and unamazing. I couldn't interpret if that was supposed to have shock value or be humorous. In "Death Dealer" he says "I am Death Dealer, Give me death". Where's the sense in that? Is he asking to die or is he saying that he wants death to be dealt, this I'm asking as a serious question. If he wants death to be dealt that wouldn't make him "Death Dealer" then, so that wasn't exactly thought out too well. He also mentions the word "necro-cannibal", in context he says "necro-cannibal, eats dead cunt" more meaningless "shock", in "Death Dealer". I'd imagine that the victim in the scenario would already be dead or he wouldn't have his flesh consumed. If you were to eat a man while he was still living he'd clearly die before you could finsih eating him, thus making the word "necro-cannibal" another poorly thought out lyric. Another weak lyric is "One foot in the grave, now your almost dead". There's no explanation, it's just there. It lacks a justification as to why and it lacks real relevance in general. They also use the "One, Two, Fuck You" thing again in "Surrender or Die". They also abuse saying the name of the song as first few words of the song. I could sit here all night and type these out but I'd rather not for there's more to talk about.

The guitar is questionable. The palm muting, a skill used in basically every song that's thrash metal, sounds mangled and poorly excuted, sorta like the rest of the album. The guitarists sound like they didn't practice a needed and basic skill. Whether this is the quality or the playing is questionable, but it's probably their playing because the quality isn't that bad. The power chords are just bland because they repeat. They barely shift a fret away from the first power chord in the riff. You can hear this and it seems like they didn't try hard enough for any variation. Like they wanted you to hear the same thing so many times in a row. In
"Tyrant of Hell" it sounds like they ripped off "Anarchy in the UK" for the verse and chorus riffs. Repeating a riff is abused in thrash sometimes and seems like Slaughter only picked three riffs for a song and repeated them. I swear this, you could count how many different riffs you hear in a song on one hand. They only use an intro riff, a verse riff, and a chorus riff. Sometimes the intro riff is the verse riff and sometimes there's very little difference between the verse and chorus riffs. It sounds lazy, the band could've done more with it but they chose not to. In "Tales of the Macabre" they bend poorly like the had little practice at it.

The drums are no more than senseless smashing. It just sounds disorganized because it mostly follows the guitars which themselves are disorganized. The bass is invisible as it is on most releases both good and bad, so this doesn't surprise me.

The vocals lack a varied delivery. The singer just blatantly shouts the words with no differentiation. It's just monotonous the whole way through. In one song he shouts something in a high pitch squeal reminiscent to that of a young child throughing a temper tantrum. When he does try to make it sounds different it just fails horribly. He makes himself sound really stupid, for lack of a better word, and it fails to add any interest into the music at hand. It also doesn't help when the lyrics are weak. It does little to help the vocals. They don't compliment each other like a good band. In "Tales of the Macabre", which again suffers poor lyrics, he shouts "die", an intelligent move, in a stereotypical halloween witch voice. I also don't like the way he says "macabre", and I'm not just saying that. It's like saying the word "route" like "rowt" to me and he does it in the way that irritates me because it's wrong.

The quality is ok, nothing top special. Everything is at a decent volume. The bass isn't present, the vocals take the front, the works. At least Slaughter got the quality right but it is no where near close to having any redeeming quality. I actually wish I could smite it. Like the mother of an irritating person, I wish I could slap it's shit. The quality allowed me to hear every last bit of horrible composing to dare call it's self metal, let alone thrash metal.

If you're like me and you thought that classic thrash couldn't possibly have a single shitty band then you're as wrong as I was. My best advice for you is to avoid at all costs. The album, or just one of the very short songs, isn't worth your time. That's time you could be spending listening to real thrash metal. I wish I never listened to this album so I could still live in the sweet ignorant state of mind I once dwelled, but now it's too late...