Strappado

Back in the days of early death metal antiquity (aka 1985-87) there were a number of massive leaps in the evolution of thrash metal, to the point where certain bands were beginning to wander completely off the reservation. This accounts for not only the birth of death metal as a distinct genre, but also for the common elements that it shared with its de facto birth-giver during its infancy. One would be hard pressed to label an album like Kreator's Pleasure To Kill or Slayer's Reign In Blood as death metal, yet the overt similarities they share with Death's debut Scream Bloody Gore and the early offerings of other Florida scene affiliates like Obituary, Malevolent Creation and several others is impossible to miss. It is within this period of transition, in all its stylistically ambiguous glory, that a short-lived creature of the same scene named Slaughter came to be, a band far more worthy of the name than the glam band that would become better known for it.

The lone full length studio offering that this band offered up in 1987, dubbed Strappado, can be viewed as both typical and atypical, depending on from what angle it is approached. The deep, muddy, almost doom oriented guitar tone bears a greater degree of similarity to the then developing Florida death metal scene than a typical thrash album of either the Bay Area variety, or even the darker and more twisted sound of the Teutonic scene. In fact, one wouldn't be too far off in likening this to the sound that Death would exhibit on Leprosy, though it's far rougher and rawer here, almost to the point of passing for an early 90s demo. It is noteworthy to mention that Chuck Schuldiner was briefly involved in this band prior to this album's release, which may account for some of these similarities, though what Slaughter ended up coming out with is far more primitive, almost to the point of hinting at a hardcore influence at times.

While this album definitely has a thrashing character to it, including but not limited to the more gruff-driven vocal delivery, by thrash metal standards the way these songs are put together is so out of sync with where thrash metal was circa 1987 that most who encountered it at the time were probably not sure what to make of it. Indeed, the song lengths almost want to suggest that this album is a bizarre take on the crossover style, in no small part because of how basic the riff set is and how minimalist the song structures tend to be. When encountering the title song that kicks this thing off, things are so chaotic that comparisons to Repulsion and maybe even some of Morbid Angel's material off of Altars Of Madness could be in order, which is interesting given that the former was still in demo mode, whereas the latter wasn't quite in this territory insofar as their limited recorded material from up till 1987 is concerned.

This isn't to say that Strappado is so completely off in its own world as to be unrecognizable from what was going on in 1987, as several of the riffs at work here can definitely be qualified as a sloppier version of something that Jeff Hanneman might have come up with, and the lead guitar work is definitely possessed of a similarly chaotic tendency as a typical Slayer lead break from the mid 80s. Likewise, certain songs like "Incinerator" and "Parasites" tend to spend more time in mid-tempo land and lean a bit more heavily on a primitive thrash crunch that is obscured a bit by the muddier guitar tone. Indeed, this entire album tends to function on a largely 2-dimensional basis, where the somewhat longer songs will coast away at mid-tempo and occasionally break into brief fits of sonic chaos, whereas the ones that keep it really short just blast away at full speed like a hoard of zombies on crack.

The historical significance of this album is without question, as very few bands were this far along in the progression of brutality that was taking shape in the recent aftermath of Seven Churches. That all being said, there are valid criticisms of this album getting a bit too repetitive at times and some of the later songs on the track list dragging a bit. The down-tempo sections almost seem to hint at the eventual death n' roll craze that would be ushered in by Entombed and Six Feet Under a little less than 10 years later, most likely due to some remnant Black Sabbath influences at play in the riff set, as per the example of "Tortured Souls". It's not quite enough to make this an obsolete piece of history like the SRB rockets on a space shuttle, but it definitely wants for some more activity and development when compared to other pioneering works out of Possessed, Sepultura, Death and a few others. It's a classic, but even the classics can have a few glaring imperfections.