Let's do Violet's other album then.
An Overdose of Death --- Toxic Holocaust --- 2008 (Relapse Records)
A one-man outfit, Toxic Holocaust is Joel Grind (really!) and his music is described as “speed/thrash/black metal”, so this should be fun. Starts off with a face-melting guitar assault, vocals that are nearly as guttural as black metal ones but relatively intelligible, delivered in a much faster tempo than usually black ones are. Hmm. Don't think there are too many political allegories or social commentaries in
these lyrics! Pretty straight forward, raw and unashamed. Interesting idea in “Nuke the cross”, of actually launching missiles against Heaven. Does the Patriot Mark V have that kind of range? You know, I was laughing at this initially but I'm sort of getting into the groove of it now. There's certainly melody in the music and it's good you can make out the vocals, which is not always the case with music of this kind. His lyrics aren't too bad either, you can see he put a lot of thought into them. “Endless Armageddon” is particularly good.
Lyrically, “Future shock” leaves a lot to be desired, but the music is pretty good; very heavy and aggressive with a really good guitar solo, while it's hard to judge “War game”, lasting as it does a mere fifty-nine seconds, but “In the name of science” has a good stab at things like (perhaps) the Nazi experiments in the concentration camps during World War II and has a good bouncing, grinding guitar line driving it. “March from Hell” really shows his struggling with the lyric:
”Legions of evil preparing to fight/ Kill the holy who come into sight/ Axes do battle, march from Hell/ Flames of evil attacking with spell” ... Um, yeah. And as for the last line ---
”As we kill and kill and kill and kill” --- what's wrong Joel? Could you not find anything to rhyme with “kill”?
It's his step over into black metal territory, and it has a kind of endearing charm to it. I think it's that it's so completely predictable, it's almost like watching a child trying to write the Declaration of Independence in crayon. Ah, bless!
There's a real boogie hook to “Gravelord”, kind of reminds me of mid-seventies Sabbath, “Children of the grave”, that kind of thing, but “War is Hell” is just really a mess. To say nothing of his contention in the lyric that everyone will die, and then going on to talk about living in ashes? Make your mind up, man! Seriously. Still, he makes a better and stronger case against war than Edwin Starr did. I really like “Lord of the wasteland” though, with a really catchy guitar riff running through it, and that kind of groove follows through into “Feedback, blood and distortion”. If I had a problem with the lyrics it's that they generally all seem to follow the same idea --- war, apocalypse, armageddon, the ruin of Earth and so on --- and he reuses ideas so often that sometimes it's hard to know which track is playing unless you look down at the running order. Some variety would be nice. Also, I'm pretty sure that album sleeve is a close copy of Tank's
Filth Hounds of Hades, which precedes this by about twenty-five years. See?
“Death from above” is another breakneck track, but it's all becoming a bit too much like the rest now and I'm getting bored. Surely Grind has more in his lyrical arsenal than these same tired, repeated, rewritten and reused phrases? “City of a million graves” has a little more originality but not so much that you notice really.
TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS
1. Wild dogs
2. Nuke the cross
3. Endless Armageddon
4. Future shock
5. War game
6. In the name of science
7. March from Hell
8. Gravelord
9. War is Hell
10. The Lord of the wasteland
11. Feedback, blood and distortion
12. Death from above
13. City of a million graves
Decent album, some good riffs and you can hear the vocals clearly which is a help, but the songs are so similar it's hard to tell one from the other. Not so much an overdose of death as an overdose of repetition.