Not Dead Yet

This band is a well-documented, standalone at that, chapter from Canadian metal history although quite a few fans, including me for some time, consider it invariably attached to the Slaughter saga, refusing to grant it an autonomous status. Well, said status is undeniable and it doesn’t really depend on the fanbase’s preferences regardless of the fact that the material from the album reviewed here is featured prominently on compilations that are a part of the Slaughter discography.

The truth is that Dave Hewson, the former Slaughter guitarist/singer and the founder of the band under scrutiny here, intended this initiative as a separate entity with which he could explore his infatuations with the purer thrashy ways of expression, once the Slaughter saga came to an end in the late-80’s. Bobby Sadzak, the guitar player of the thrashers Lethal Presence, was only too willing to collaborate with Hewson, and Strappado became a fact. As Hewson used the title of Slaughter’s mythical debut as the name of this new project, the audience may have thought initially that this was going to be a further hardening of the course towards full-blooded death metal or thereabouts, a tendency already started on this first instalment…

no, nothing of the kind here, and those who had managed to hear the music on Slaughter’s last two demos before the split-up were well aware that all possible dreams of death had been (un)timely mortified in the band’s camp. In other words, Hewson simply elaborated on those two efforts, giving these more accessible sounds an official release veneer. This new endeavour is quite comparable to Possessed’s “Beyond the Gates” where the guys’ US counterparts left their initial more brutal deathy predilections from “Seven Churches” aside and opted for a less intense thrash-prone approach with more polished, semi-technical guitar work.

The speedy histrionics are still around as reflected in the title-track and the short ripping “Flake”, but the rhythm-sections are more ingeniously-woven, not having the bashing urgency that was so prominent on the debut. The slower cuts ("Threshold of Pain") are more reminiscent of the ones from Slayer’s late-80’s period than of the stomping Celtic Frost-esque tunes that graced similar tracks on the first showing. Bigger musical prowess starts emerging in the second half, to the listener’s delight, with the excellent short early Coroner reminder "Time Warp" and the atmospheric more complexly-assembled "The Dark". Expect some really stylish guitar work ala Mike Scaccia (R.I.P.; Rigor Mortis, Ministry) on the more linear, but inordinately lively speed/thrasher "Astral Projektor" before "Telepathic Screams" adds more dark brooding leaps and bounds to the template, a multi-layered masterpiece with sparse flashes of more technical genius those not fully developed, intentionally or not.

Regardless, this album remains a highly entertaining listen all the way with Hewson supervising the proceedings with his traditionally effective spat-out, semi-shouty/semi-declamatory baritone, the man fully convinced of the direction he was taking with this offspring of his, away from the hustle’n bustle that the fashionable at the time death metal roster was creating left and right. On the other hand, he had hardly had any long-term plans for it, either, as to play retro thrash at the dawn of an angrier, groovier decade was not exactly the most commercially viable step. The band tried their hands on it once more, though, with the “Fatal Judgement” EP which was another worthy achievement introducing lengthy, progressive compositions with quite a few nuances embedded those giving an imposing, gothic-like aura to the staple classic thrash core, the two numbers from the album here (the title-track and “Flake”) thrown at the end, not altered even by a single note, a somewhat disputable presence.

Hewson took part in the very short-lived Slaughter reunion in 1994 while some of his comrades from here, including the mentioned Sadzak, founded the industrial death metal cohort Inner Thought, an enterprise that was a steady solid presence throughout the 90’s with two full-lengths and two EP’s released, standing right beside their compatriots Soulstorm as prime providers of intimidating, steam-rolling machine-like sounds from the Cold North. Back to the Slaughter batch, the guys indulged in a lengthy string of compilation releases in the new millennium, without even being officially active… signs of semi-life at least that haven’t generated that much excitement in the always expectant fanbase. Maybe not totally dead yet?