Rats in the Temple, the sixteenth studio album and first for Napalm Records for American thrash heroes Flotsam and Jetsam, arrives after nearly four decades of making metal, and it sounds less like a band riding the wave of an unexpected resurgence. Following The End of Chaos, Blood in the Water and I Am the Weapon, and it continues the remarkably strong late-career run that has made them one of the more interesting survivors of American thrash.
The title is appropriate. There are rats everywhere. Some of them are political. Some are personal. Some are probably living in your television.
And some are inside your skull at three in the morning.
The album begins with “Harvesting the Hate,” which is exactly the sort of song you want when the world has spent the morning informing you that civilization has once again made a terrible mistake. It is fast, melodic, vicious and immediately memorable. The guitars of Michael Gilbert and Steve Conley arrive with the precision of men who have been doing this long enough to know that a good riff does not require a committee meeting.
“Damnation” keeps the momentum tight and running on time, while “Absolution” is where the record really bares its teeth. The latter is a particularly sharp piece of precision thrash, all rapid-fire riffing, sudden transitions and a chorus that gives the song somewhere to go besides simply faster.
Then comes the gritty “Blame the Knife,” and eventually the title track.
“Rats in the Temple” is one of the album’s best moments. It is dark, technical and ugly in the best possible way, with Ken Mary’s drumming given enough room to remind everybody that speed is considerably more impressive when the drummer actually knows where he is going. The song also carries one of the record’s strongest modern-metal qualities: the musicianship is formidable without turning into a mathematics examination.
Eric A.K. Knutson remains at the centre of it all. He does not sound like the young man who screamed through Doomsday for the Deceiver. Nobody sounds like the young man they were forty years ago, unless they are dead, in which case they generally have other problems. A.K.’s voice is deeper and rougher now, but it gives these songs an authority that youth could not provide. He sounds like someone who has seen enough of the world to stop asking whether it is going to improve.
It probably isn’t.
“The Ghost Behind My Door” and “First on the Spike” continue the assault, marrying old-school thrash instincts to a considerably heavier modern production. “The Edge of Nowhere” brings another dimension, building tension before exploding into another burst of riff-driven violence. Then “Last Rites” arrives like somebody kicking open the door of a room where everyone was trying to have a reasonable conversation.
Reasonable conversation is overrated.
The album is modern, but it doesn’t sound like a collection of old men attempting to impersonate teenagers. The twin guitars still have the melodic intelligence that has always separated Flotsam from a lot of their thrash contemporaries, while the rhythm section of Bill Bodily and Ken Mary gives the songs their muscular foundation.
“A Taste for War” is another highlight, with the rhythm section taking a more prominent role and the song functioning as an unmistakably anti-war statement. The closing “Not Goin’ Down That Way” leaves the record with a suitably defiant final word.
In 1986, when Doomsday for the Deceiver first appeared, Flotsam and Jetsam were part of the generation building the language. Forty years later, they are using that language with a vocabulary accumulated from everything that happened afterward: traditional metal, power metal, modern production, technical riffing and the sheer accumulated weight of decades spent playing too loudly.
That is why Rats in the Temple works. It does not pretend that 1986 never ended. It just refuses to apologise for having survived it.
Donnie’s Rating: 8/10
