Weapons of Thrash Destruction

By Andy Osborn. Dammit. Just when I thought the wave of new, interesting bands from Greece was dying down, this deadly duo had to appear. Both with new albums this year. Both bio-inclined, as it were. And both annihilating a genre many of us know has grown stale over the years. But despite all the similarities

By Andy Osborn.

Dammit. Just when I thought the wave of new, interesting bands from Greece was dying down, this deadly duo had to appear. Both with new albums this year. Both bio-inclined, as it were. And both annihilating a genre many of us know has grown stale over the years. But despite all the similarities, they’re different enough to offer two perspectives on the style and prove that when done right, thrash can be as powerful a force as it was 30 years ago.

Artwork by Andrei Bouzikov

Bio-Cancer are easily the more extreme of the two. They take what thrash was in its earliest form, a mishmash of all things deadly, and channels it into a modern, extreme form. And extremity is clearly the focus, as the album never relents and only grows more intense and blistering in pace.

The band as a whole is constantly firing on all cylinders and withering them into molten cores, but vocalist Lefteris is their weapon that’s the true force of destruction on Tormenting the Innocent. His insanity-driven, manic delivery is largely incomprehensible in the best way possible, as if possessed by a fire-spitting demon fighting to escape his body. The guitar attack is largely built of the promise of speed-infused, if not overly memorable, riffery. But they switch things up just enough to keep things interesting while staying firmly grounded in their trash attach. The hellish melodeath bridge in “Boxed Out” would make Kalmah proud, the cello intro to “F(r)iends or Fiends” soothes, and the blistering, grinding attack of “Haters Gonna… Suffer” is bewildering. The aforementioned title and contained Liam Neeson audio clip made me want to hate everything about that song, but it reminds me that grin-inducing, headbangable fun is the whole point of this type of music. I know what I’ll be drinking heavily to this summer.

Artwork by Roberto Toderico

While Biotoxic Warfare also stick to the extreme side of thrash, their attack is based on the battle plan forged by the likes of Kreator and Morbid Saint. Kicking off the album with a clear nod to a certain Slayer intro, it becomes immediately clear that they take the more traditional approach. Less insane and more predictable than Bio-Cancer, this is straight-up thrash for thrash lovers.

There’s little ground being broken by these sleeveless Cretians, but their worship is worthy. With a sense of groove and more sustainable tempo, this new quintet is making music more interesting and biting than any of the OG heroes still drudgingly putting out albums as they enter their fourth decade. The guitarists have the Hanneman-Kerry thing down pat, seamlessly trading off leads and solos and keeping the whole band on their toes. Re-thrash has been a four letter word for a while now, but Biotoxic Warfare prove that there’s still a healthy room for the classic sound done right.

Bell Witch - Four Phantoms

By Justin C. I should have hated this album the first time I listened to it. It was a Monday morning, I'd slept poorly, and on top of being on my way to work late on a day I needed to get a lot done, I discovered too late that I had a hole in my shirt. I was somewhere between Charlie Brown and the guy in Munch's "The Scream" in terms of mood

By Justin C.

Cover art by Paolo Girardi

I should have hated this album the first time I listened to it. It was a Monday morning, I'd slept poorly, and on top of being on my way to work late on a day I needed to get a lot done, I discovered too late that I had a hole in my shirt. I was somewhere between Charlie Brown and the guy in Munch's "The Scream" in terms of mood, which would normally call for some steering wheel-punching, shouting-at-other-drivers blackened metal, not creeping doom. I needed to get fired up, not droned out, but for whatever reason, I queued up Bell Witch's Four Phantoms. Imagine my surprise when instead of bumming me out, I was rolling on a wave of staggeringly good doom.

Photo by Invisible Hour

I liked Bell Witch's last one, Longing, just fine, but I was in no way prepared for the huge leap forward they'd take on Four Phantoms. All of the usual metal writer cliches fail here. It's ridiculous to call this music "face ripping" or "gut punching" or "toe severing" or anything else of that ilk. I struggled to think of the proper metaphor, but the second track on the album, "Judgement, In Fire: I - Garden (of Blooming Ash)" (the band's punctuation is as dense as their music on this one), finally gave me clarity: The opening percussion explosions in the song are the volcano eruptions, and the bass and vocals are the slowly seeping lava. You can't set a metronome low enough for most of these tempos, but the flow of the music will pull you along regardless.

The songcraft is excellent here, which is saying a lot for an album whose shortest track is over 10 minutes and whose longest track is pushing 23 minutes. That's a lot of space to fill and a lot of places for boredom to creep in, especially with music at such glacial speeds, but I never get bored. The vocals range from understated cleans to deep growls, and the bass, which straddles both rhythm and melody, shows just how melodic you can be on an instrument that usually hides in the shadows. Listen to the opening strains of "Suffocation, a Drowning" or the vocal harmonies about 6 minutes in and tell me you don't get chills. I dare you. The drums are minimalistic, but offer the perfect backbone to this meditative music.

Photo by Invisible Hour

As I've said in other reviews, if you play music this slow and with parts this naked and vulnerable, you have to squeeze every drop of musicality out of every note. You can't hide behind a wall of effects or technicality, and damn, Bell Witch makes every note count. There's not a throwaway moment on this album, and given some of the bloated beasts you find in underground metal these days, what higher praise can you give? Plenty of people have already talked about this album, and I'm shamefully late to the party, but if you blew this off because you usually like something more frenetic, I urge you to give it a try.

Crawl - Old Wood & Broken Dreams

By Ulla Roschat. With their first full length album Old Wood & Broken Dreams (2014) Atlanta based sludge trio Crawl delivers a chunk of sludge metal that is deeply rooted in southern tradition. It’s bluesy, swampy, heavy, with a thick and sticky atmosphere infused with the smell of whiskey and weed

By Ulla Roschat.



With their first full length album Old Wood & Broken Dreams (2014) Atlanta based sludge trio Crawl delivers a chunk of sludge metal that is deeply rooted in southern tradition. It’s bluesy, swampy, heavy, with a thick and sticky atmosphere infused with the smell of whiskey and weed, executed with a laid back attitude, still destructive as hell.

The album starts with a short instrumental intro track "Crack Tea" and sets the mood with fuzzy blues ridden stoner riffs that hint at the heaviness yet to come. And with each following song, the album gathers intensity and heaviness. The second song “Don’t Kid Me” begins with warm acoustic sounds that soon get wrapped in droney distortion, the next one "Pilldust", again an instrumental track and one of the two longer songs (11:33) on the album, adds hypnotic, minimalistic rhythms that build into doom riffs to finally merge into a psyched out stoner jam.

The Buzzov•en cover "Useless" brings yet another quality of intensity to the album. The vocals here are charged with an extra portion of filth and brutality - a well made new dress for this classic. The longest track “Nigredo” (12:35) uses its time to carefully create massive heavy sludge riffs that evolve from a driving desert-y groove. A quiet ambient "neurosis-like" second part with clean vocals carries the song slowly back to its beginning with a spaced out version of its initial rhythm. A variety of moods and dynamics are in here to enjoy.

And the last track "3 A.M. and a Loaded Gun" is the darkest and most depressive one. The otherwise omnipresent and dominant bluesy, swampy sludge gets twisted here into a cold, bleak kind of sludge, infected with industrial noise, charged with crackling electricity.

Old Wood & Broken Dreams is six songs of traditional southern swamp sludge, soaked in muddy blues and drone sounds, heavy and destructive, but subtly flavoured with stoner grooves, HC beats, psycho rhythms and quiet acoustic parts, blended into the mix in such a skillful way that all comes out pretty organic and contributes to the overall laid back feeling and the high tension dynamics as well… as if this weren’t a contradiction at all.

The song "Useless" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 85