Thrash Metal
If glam metal was the new messiah of the metal world, which had effectively turned sunny Los Angeles into a modern day Babylon full of debauchery and sleaze, thrash metal would take the metal yardstick into a much meaner direction. Thrash metal effectively sprung up in San Francisco, pretty amazing really given the city’s long standing history with the hippy and psychedelic movements of the 1960s, but the city had displayed for a number of years now what could be termed as ‘hardcore metal’. This scene was centred around the city’s ‘Bay Area’ where two bands proved to vital in the genre’s development and they were Exodus who were formed in 1980 but waited almost five years before their debut was issued and of course the mighty Metallica who quickly became the genre’s most important and innovative band. The scene had taken off commercially in 1983 with Metallica’s
Kill ‘Em All and Slayer’s
Show No Mercy (see 1983 reviews) two thrash albums that were actually quite distinctive from each other. The Metallica album demonstrated the core sound of thrash and the technical direction that it would soon move into, whilst Slayer used their blitzkrieg attack to plunge even further into the darkest depths of the human mind and they were of course the wicked successors to Venom, and the style of Slayer attributed at this stage exactly where thrash metal would meet black metal. Over the next couple of years genre formation band Exodus would issue for many ‘the thrash album’ in
Bonded in Blood and Megadeth would take things even faster with their debut. The west coast scene would also be boosted up by the east coast thrash movement headed up by the likes of Overkill and with the arrival of Anthrax would present thrash in a somewhat different light. As a musical style the genre deomstrated some unique musical traits and these included super fast guitar solos, complex guitar riffs and the genre’s trademark double bass drumming. Lycrically the band’s focused on social issues and attacks against the establishment (all shared with punk) and some delved into extreme acts of violence, war, death and also satanic subject issues carrying on the Black Sabbath legacy. A huge amount were influenced by the NWOBHM and hardcore punk and so the aggressive attitude and image of these bands was usually a far cry from the glam metal scene.
Thrash metal could be seen as taking off for a number of reasons circa 1983-1985 1) With the demise of the NWOBHM as a driving force for metal, a new and even meaner kid was needed on the block for prestige purposes. 2) It was obvious that the more aggressive metal sound out there, would at one stage merge with the aggression of hardcore punk. 3) A number of metal artists pretty much despised the ‘hair metal brigade’ as betraying the true spirit of metal, I even remember watching a dvd many years ago where some of the members of Megadeth stated how much they hated these hair metal bands. 4) If the previous statement is true, then it’s obvious that a rebellion like thrash would take off to restore order as such in the metal world. 5) There was no way that truly brutal sounding albums full of technical attitude like Judas Priest’s
Stained Class wouldn’t have their successor albums coming up sometime soon. Now early thash I would split into two categories, there were those bands like Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Exodus who lived and breathed this kind of music and played nothing else. Then there were bands who treated thrash metal as an almost transitory style before moving onto something else, or indeed going back to what they were doing before and this includes bands like Savatage, Metal Church, Exciter and Raven, all bands that put out one or two thrash dominant albums around this time.
Now interestingly two forum members have made two important comments about thrash metal that should be noted here. Firstly The Batlord has dismissed thrash metal as not being truly extreme metal, stating that it qualifies only in part. This is something that I now mostly agree with, given the boundaries that extreme sub-metal genres like death metal and black metal would soon cross into, but The Batlord’s statement is really only correct in hindsight, because circa 1983 to 1984 the bands that made up thrash were as extreme as it got and set the stall out for being extreme. Slayer sounded evil but to find something truly despicable sounding you really had to look at something like Norway’s Bathory. Venom of course also sounded evil, but to be fair weren’t really taken that seriously by many of their peers at the time, despite their future massive influence on extreme metal. Also most notably Janszoon has stated that before thrash metal, he felt that metal never truly felt like it was its own genre and states that it felt and sounded like a sub-genre of rock in general. Again I agree with this, as most 1970s metal bands could just be called bands that inhabited the heavier end of the rock spectrum, in fact when I was writing the 1970s reviews, I often referred to most of the scene as ‘heavy rock’ to encompass everything. Even heavily identifiable bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, could all be attained as having a load of rock influences into their music, but did themselves favours by adopting a truly metal image. Both these bands of course are two of the most important on the influence of metal anyway including thrash here, even though Black Sabbath were more influential on other extreme metal genres. Finally it wasn’t really until the NWOBHM that metal truly created an identity as a movement, but even then this movement encompassed a whole load of bands that were still playing 1970s heavy rock anyway and it was only when they started to forge their sound to a metal image that metal was moving in the right direction. The NWOBHM may have finally opened the door for metal, but I personally think that thrash metal would prove to be the single most important movement in the history of metal, because it truly created the genre, opened the door to extreme metal and introduced to metal a complete generation of new listeners, who still find some of the core thrash bands just as relevant to today as they were back in the mid 1980s.