Spring Break
MADE OF METAL: Bloodbath douses metalheads with musical gore
by Daniel D. Snyder
Associate Editor
Arts | 11/18/08
Posted online at 3:19 AM EST on 11/18/08
/ Last updated at 11:16 AM EST on 11/18/08
I hate to discredit the anti-trend section of the Metalhead Manifesto, but the truth is that we're not always as against-the-grain as we'd like to think we are. Retro is all the rage in the mainstream these days, and a quick glance at the current state of metal will reveal a startling similarity in our own community's current preferences. While popular culture cannibalizes the 1960s and early '70s for sound and image, metal has been feasting with equal fervor on the corpse of early-to-mid-'80s thrash.
Everywhere you look, be it on review sites, in metal mags or in tour lineups, there's a quartet of young guns in painfully tight jeans and vests "keepin' the spirit of dirty denim thrash alive, man!" This last bit roughly translates into "We're going to bore the poo out of you by reviving, with no variation whatsoever, perhaps the single most one-dimensional sound in the history of all things hard, fast and loud." There's also the less spotlighted retro death metal genre, led by bands like Hail of Bullets, Facebreaker and the focus of this week's edition, Bloodbath.
While you might be quick to call out the latter genre on the same faults as the former, there are a few important differences, ones that grant old-school death metal a little more street cred. First and foremost, unlike pure Bay Area thrash, the luminaries of pure Swedish death metal (Entombed, Dismember) never really went away, whereas in the past few years leading up to the current craze, every major and minor thrash band who ever recorded more than two songs reunited after a decade or more. Second, the newer bands leading the retro-death movement tend to feature members who were either part of the original scene during its golden era (Hail of Bullets boasts veterans of metal from Pestilence, Gorefest and Thanatos), or were at least old enough to remember and actually absorb its music. The members of Warbringer, arguably the leaders of this whole retro-thrash initiative, were still learning how to poop while Slayer was shredding eardrums.
Everywhere you look, be it on review sites, in metal mags or in tour lineups, there's a quartet of young guns in painfully tight jeans and vests "keepin' the spirit of dirty denim thrash alive, man!" This last bit roughly translates into "We're going to bore the poo out of you by reviving, with no variation whatsoever, perhaps the single most one-dimensional sound in the history of all things hard, fast and loud." There's also the less spotlighted retro death metal genre, led by bands like Hail of Bullets, Facebreaker and the focus of this week's edition, Bloodbath.
While you might be quick to call out the latter genre on the same faults as the former, there are a few important differences, ones that grant old-school death metal a little more street cred. First and foremost, unlike pure Bay Area thrash, the luminaries of pure Swedish death metal (Entombed, Dismember) never really went away, whereas in the past few years leading up to the current craze, every major and minor thrash band who ever recorded more than two songs reunited after a decade or more. Second, the newer bands leading the retro-death movement tend to feature members who were either part of the original scene during its golden era (Hail of Bullets boasts veterans of metal from Pestilence, Gorefest and Thanatos), or were at least old enough to remember and actually absorb its music. The members of Warbringer, arguably the leaders of this whole retro-thrash initiative, were still learning how to poop while Slayer was shredding eardrums.
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