Slaughter: Strappado - 1987
I love eighties extreme metal. It's so ugly and ****ty sounding. Cryptopsy might be the finished article, but this kind of stuff, the stuff that you don't know whether it's thrash, black, or death metal is my bag, baby. Slaughter are a great example of this. A rough combination of thrash metal, primordial death metal, hardcore punk, and grindcore come together to form this band.
Another thing that I love is that this album is only twenty-three minutes long. The idea that an album should be longer than thirty minutes annoys me to no end. I have the attention span of a gnat and after that amount of time, unless I am truly into what I am listening to, I start to feel music fatigue. This also illustrates just how much this band is influenced by hardcore punk. The riffs are metal, the vocals cheesy thrash with a touch of death metal, but the simple ferocity of the delivery is pure punk. Many of the songs are under two minutes long, and it seems that many of the longer ones are drawn out by extended, mid-paced riffing rather than any actual songwriting. BTW, I'm pretty sure they recycle the same mid-paced riff at times throughout the album, and since it's such a simple riff, and since these sections are generally of some length, it becomes pretty obvious. If I'm wrong then they at least use a lot of really similar riffs. To some this might seem dumb, but I'm easily pleased, and this riff is heavy and catchy as ****, so I couldn't care less. And it always goes great in between the blast 'n' grind sections so it's all good.
Damn it. Where the **** is BastardofYoung to high five me for mentioning these guys?