Through the Back Door

Cause they almost escaped through the back door again, these cunning Polish maestros. And it’s good that the eyes of the metal vigilantes caught them on time to stop this from happening; otherwise the metal fanbase was going to miss on one of the most impressive exhibitions of technical/progressive thrash mastery in the annals of the genre.

It’s amazing how well quite a few thrash metal acts (Pascal, Chor Chorea, Megora, The Bedlam, Beyond (Canada), etc.) delivered on a demo level only to lose it all once the official release stage had been reached… оur friends here belong to that group, and they may as well top it up since their demo days were light years ahead of their albums in terms of both musicianship and ideas. The debut one was already an ambitious slab of more complex thrash, still in a more conventional form, but fairly engaging and professionally executed nonetheless.

However, the leap witnessed on the demo reviewed here was so big that whatever sparkles of creativity there were on the first showing, were completely erased off the map with just a single track. The band line up right next to visionaries like Realm, Deathrow, and Sieges Even, and those from their homeland like Acrimony, Astharoth and Dragon with just this half an hour of challenging, mind-boggling musicianship which only unmitigated flaw is the sloppy production that takes away some of the guitars’ sharp cutting edge. And the guys even managed to occupy a niche of their own in Poland as they don’t throw too many experimental flourishes the way Wolf Spider and Hamer do; neither do they call death metal in for help akin to Dragon; neither do they space out with quirky psychedelic shades the way Acrimony and Astharoth do.

This is pretty much technical thrash by-the-book, only overloaded with time-signatures and dizzying tempo shifts that come in such a quick succession that the listener will simply not be able to figure everything out after just one listen. “My-Not, My Home” is a marvellous summation of the band’s flamboyant style with a pile of puzzling riffs which change every few seconds, with speedy and slower passages interlaced, quite logically for most of the time, the dispassionate semi-declamatory vocals supervising this eventful cannonade without pretending to be anything but a humble appendage to it. “Now You Fly!” is another hallucinogenic shredder also giving more room for the fast-paced sections to get the headbanging going, but risks of sprained necks are quite probable as the less linear interruptions are too frequent. “I’m a Hero” alone may beat Dark Angel’s feat achieved on “Time Does Not Heal” with a myriad of perplexing riff-patterns which create a spiral-like black hole that sucks in the listener inadvertently, refusing to let him/her go for nearly 6-min.

“Changes” does change the formula a little bit being the only more eccentric piece with bizarre illogical leaps and bounds starkly contrasting with the hyper-active very speedy, more orthodox background; but the title-track returns to the established conventions to some extent although the guitar acrobatics reach Shrapnel-like parametres at some stage, the riff-density becoming so big that in the closing minute the delivery simply bursts in a fountain of stylish, exuberant technicality. “Bastard Part II” (part I was on the first demo) is just one more display of technical thrash dexterity with infernally intricate skirmishes flying from all sides, not leaving too many chances for the lead guitarist to shine although the guy tries his best to get heard here. “Thoughts Detector”, which is much longer than 01:21min as listed here, is a mirror soundscape of the opener, an encyclopaedia of technical/progressive thrashery, an intimidating, not always very accessible labyrinth of head-spinning riff vortexes, dramatic accumulations, abrupt more standard fast-paced strokes, weird bass pirouettes, and what not…

this is so over-the-top that at some stage the listener will just start smiling widely, sticking a gigantic ear-to-ear smile on his/her face like Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, failing to follow the plot on a riff-by-riff basis, but fully aware, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he/she is listening to something truly impressive, something that doesn’t occur very often on the scene. Amazingly, every song differs from the others either due to a certain brief melodic etude, or to some kind of a chorus, or to a particular riff-construction that doesn’t necessarily get repeated in the same way elsewhere. In other words, this doesn’t come as one big ultra-elaborate melee, devoid of logic and coherence, but follows an underlying order that guides it all the way to the end, only letting a couple of isolated premature climactic decisions slip through.

The Dutch Mystrez’s “The Indictment”, released two years earlier, may be cited as a close soundalike although the riff applications here are bigger in number and more urgently applied. The other reference comes from the death metal side, Crimson Massacre’s “The Lustre of Pandemonium”, that appeared much later, another similar compendium of highly stylized shreds and mazey configurations, the Americans also falling into sudden, not very heralded, spasmodic fits of headlong speedy linearity. Testor themselves never tried to repeat this feat; they were very well aware that this wouldn’t have been possible, not in this, not in any other lifetime. Their full-length was a passable modern semi-technical thrashism which delivered for the time of release, but the same can’t be said about their albums from the new millennium which are fairly derivative, modern thrash recordings without any redeeming qualities. The band were meant to come with all the guns blazing and all the fanfares just this once; and it was good that they were caught before their disappearing act was complete. Otherwise the metal fanbase was going to miss out on a show to remember performed by some of the metal scene’s most gifted “escape artists”.