German thrash monsters return for some monstrous thrash
Remember when thrash, well, thrashed? When it is all about speed, anger, moshpits and nastiness?
Good. So do Destruction.
“Under Attack” is their first album for four years and while most of their peers – both in Europe and further afield – have settled gracefully into old age and into some form or other of “maturity” (usually this means they can’t do it anymore and is the precursor for some boring music) the German trio have, like Slayer in fairness, gone the other way and are basically saying to everyone else: “you carry on doing what you want to, we’d rather kick the crap out of something, thanks.”
At least that’s how the ten tracks that make their 14th album feel, you can feel the hate, vitriol and bile dripping all over the title track and “Generation Nevermore” and if you think they’ll pause for breath at any point, then you’d be wrong.
It seems that Mike Sifringer and Marcel “Schmier” Schirmer, the men who have basically piloted this band largely throughout the last three decades (give or take the usual revolving door of a line-up) have decided that it’s a nasty old time out there and that they’d like to document that. “Dethroned” suggests that the human race has forgotten evolution – although does so over such breakneck riffery that its possible to not even notice the message.
The wall of sound created on the unsettling “Getting Used To The Evil” is a little slower, but a lot more crushing, but its followed up by “Pathogenic” which is one of the fastest things on offer here, while “Second To None” is the almost identikit nasty song, taking on social media with the magnificent opening couplet: “in this violent world/we all want to have a voice/but does it need to be heard/and do we have a choice.”
“….Attack” might end with the whirlwind “Stigmatized” but there are a couple of other songs just before that sum both this record and Destruction 2016 up. Firstly “Stand Up For What You Deliver” has little time for anything whatsoever, with particular ire reserved for religion, but its “Elegant Pigs” that you sense gives them the most pleasure. “What the fuck ever happened to the true spirit of rock?” sneers Schmier, before rounding on soulless backing tracks and “traitors” and “destroyers” of rock n roll.
It concludes, as if there was any doubt, that “pureness is the key”. And in so doing, hits the studded nail right into the leather belt, because its doubtful there will be a better or more pure thrash expedition anywhere else this year.
Absolutely, relentlessly brilliant.
Rating 9/10
