Sludge or thrash ? Why not both...

Lair Of The Minotaur - Carnage

You all probably know what Lair Of The Minotaur is all about,so i'm gonna make this a short one : if you're a Black Cobra or High On Fire fan,download this,if not,well you should still download it.

"Raise your horned hands, metal brethren! A new group is in our midst, unleashing the most nefarious concoction of Slayer, Celtic Frost, Sabbath, and Venom yet. The name of these evildoers? Lair of the Minotaur. Not only does this trio's heavy metal joyride keep it real, they keep it amazingly heavy, dynamic, sludgy, and...conceptual? Yup. Each song off of Carnage's eight tracks recounts a tale from Greek mythology as they pound you into the ground with sick riffs and terse rhythms. They even throw in some keyboards for that black metal touch on the diabolic "Demon Serpent". LOTM project a stunning display of metal awareness, as Carnage is fully blessed by the gods of metal as worthy."(review from somewhere on the internet)

Groove metal pioneers...

Exhorder - Discography

This is the band that practicly invented the groove metal sound with their first album,"Slaughter In The Vatican"...Pantera ripped of the band's music,after they turned from glam,but you will probably notice this anyway.These two albums are a must-have for any thrash/post-thrash fan.Here's a review for "The Law" :

"Their debut, Slaughter In Vatican, was very thrash for 1990. It was released in a period of general crises in thrash metal and this The Law shows some of the viruses that would have caused the death of thrash metal. The most obvious and famous one is groove. It�s so evident and clear to anyone if you listen to this album. Anyways, I must admit that I like this album much more than the other ones that featured these damaging influences.

What really blows my mind is the guitars tune. Already in their debut there was a truly pounding guitars sound but here is almost unbelievable. If you remember the Exodus sound in that period, here we can find that tune but here it�s far more scratchy and devastating with plenty of treble distortions on the amplifiers. The songs are a good bland of fastest parts with some down tempo and groove mid paced parts; the hyper clear production exalts all the instruments, transforming the guitars sound in an impenetrable wall.

The drums are clear cut but not pounding, creating a prefect musical detachment from the hyper artificial guitars. The only thing that seems a bit triggered is the bass drum that sounds so similar to groups like Heathen and Overkill in that period. One of the fastest tracks here is �Unforgiven� with plenty of sudden restarts under the sign of fast bass drums triplets and up tempo. The opener shows also some arpeggios and the classic faster mid paced riffs that are so common in this genre.

The violence level is always high, thanks also to fast bass drums of �I Am The Cross�. �Unborn Again� is the most progressive tracks of the album because it shows some funky bass parts and different guitars. The vocals are a violent, pissed off copy of the ones by Anselmo and all the songs, generally, are very similar to the Pantera compositions for style and attitude. Also some groove tempo parts are very similar but here everything is far heavier.

Really, I�m not able to describe the damned guitars tone, and reaching the end of this album could be very dangerous for your ears, or better, for your mental sanity. It�s like being close to a continue chainsaw that tries to cut a door made of metal. Obviously, the thrash metal influences here are far less present and audible than on their debut and I can describe this album �as if Pantera were thrasher and with more balls�. There is also an excellent cover of �Into The Void� by Black Sabbath and, with these sounds, it�s even more doom and heavy.

At the end, I feel a bit hesitant which category of listeners I can recommend this album to. There are several fast parts but it�s necessary you to forget a bit the thrash metal to jump into the groove genre. You all know how much I hate groove but if it�s well filtered through violence and a bunch of damned heavy and restless riffs, there are no problems at all. Just avoid listening to it if you already have the headache that day."(review from metal-arhives.com)

Keeping the old school thrash alive...

Aggression - Thrashing Your Brain EP(2008)

Agression is a canadian thrash metal band.They play 80s old thrash,and they play it awesome:brutally fast riffs,bone crushing drums and all the other crap.As long as band like this will be,thrash metal will never die !

(i can't find a review...in fact im just too lazy to search one so just download the fucking EP)

Let's see if they screw this one up...

Metallica - Cyanite (New Track)

This is a new track from Metallica,they played it at Ozzfest 2009 and damn...it's pretty good,nothing that can top the old stuff but still,not bad.

I can see an UFO...

Strapping Young Lad - Alien

Another great album from Townsend's band...

"This album absolutely owns! While I do enjoy Strapping�s other work, �Alien� completely obliterates them all!

Once you listen to track one, Imperial, it really sets the mood for what the rest of the album holds. It�s dark, it�s scary, and it�s goddamn brilliant. Each track is different in it�s own way, but they all retain the same heaviness and darkness and that unique SYL quality.

The guitars really set the atmosphere of the album. They�re not overpowering the other instruments like on their self-titled, yet they�re not in the background either. They�re at the right volume to be forceful but not dominant. With the playing, it�s impeccable. Both Devin and Jed mostly use the lower strings, but occasionally come out with something that could sound like a solo, but never eventuates (Shitstorm, Shine). We Ride is the only song with solo�s, and while they�re good, it�s better that they limited it to one song, as the album really didn�t need solo�s and endless wankery everywhere. The drumming is also tightly played. Some of the beats he does are awesome, not to mention that in some parts of the album, you�ll find that the beats are more complex than originally thought (for example, at 2:08 in Shine, he adds � hi-hats in a 4/4 beat. I never noticed that until much later, and it was a very interesting find!). It just makes the music that much more technical and interesting.

The best part of the album has to be the vocals. Not many albums can state that the vocals are the best quality of the music, but I think here it is. It�s unlike Devin�s other work. He does his usual clean singing (Love?) and regular harsh vocals, but then occasionally he�ll come out with a very long scream (Love?, Thalamus) that would surely render my lungs unusable.

One of the most stand-out songs is definitely Shitstorm. One of the most negative, hate-filled songs to be ever produced, it really shows Devin Townsend�s state of mind at the time. The song climbs and climbs until it reaches a peak where Devin screams �I fucking hate myself! Everything about this is fucked!�, and then descends back down to normality again. Brilliant.

After the seventh track, your mind needs time to recover from what hit it, so track eight�s Two Weeks is a slower, acoustic piece to bring you back to the real world again. It works as an intermission, and oddly enough, it does its job perfectly. Somehow, it fits with the rest of the album, which by any metal album�s standards, shouldn�t. It�s very�classy. That�s the only way to describe it.

Skeksis is another excellent track, easily my favourite. It�s a long one, which takes over two minutes to get started, but the whole thing is quality. At 4:14, Gene become a human drum machine, essentially playing the same thing over and over until 5:31, yet it never gets boring. Also, at 4:14, a guitar riff comes in from the rhythm guitar that will have you automatically headbanging. Awesome stuff.

It wouldn�t be feasible for me to explain the highlights of every song, because I think I�ve made my point. Basically, this album is the heaviest, and probably will be the heaviest, album of Strapping Young Lad�s discography. If you love heavy death metal, this album has to be in your collection. Let the insanity begin."(review from metal-arhives.com)

I'm already running out of stupid titles,god dammit.

Grip .inc - Incorporated

This band is the side project of Dave Lombardo,the drummer from Slayer...

"For their fourth album, Grip Inc. has solidified into a terrifically cold and destructive metal machine. While a lot of underground acts in the early 2000s strived to emulate the increasingly popular medieval torture devices (so to speak) of Scandinavia's finest, Incorporated is thoroughly modern, an impressively clinical and precise record, fully industrialized and loaded with razor-sharp riffs, ballsy vocals, and thunder drums. European producer and guitarist extraordinaire Waldemar Sorchyta is Grip Inc.'s main creative force, but on-again, off-again Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo gives the band a chilly technical edge that is uniquely the product of the mind-bogglingly influential skinsman. Add in vocalist Gus Chambers' powerful, full-bodied vocals -- refreshingly, there are no affected death growls here, just a deep well of a throat that refuses to shy away from a thick melody -- and Incorporated successfully bucks many of metal's genre-specific trends (i.e., mindless death metal brutality, mosh-happy retro-thrash, grating black metal scrapes, boneheaded hardcore grunt'n'shoves). The album is simultaneously mechanistic and tribal, at times flavored with Middle Eastern melodies and electronic flourishes, Sorchyta's steamroller mix blotting out the sun and meshing perfectly with compellingly twisty arrangements. The guitarist's artery-bursting riffs churn, bubble, and boil during precision speedsters "Curse (Of the Cloth)" and "Endowment of Apathy," while midtempo march "(Built To) Resist" spotlights Lombardo's in-the-pocket prowess (he inarguably has the best feet in metal) while piling on, fugue-like, a vaguely sinister string arrangement and dense melodic layers, eventually building to a mountainous, weighty climax. Point being, Incorporated is a collection of top-flight riffs smartly choreographed into 11 spot-on tunes highlighted by performances brimming over with personality (although Lombardo reins in the experimentalism of weirdo Mike Patton project Fantômas and his solo work) and chops to spare. It's another impressive effort -- like 1999's hopelessly overlooked Solidify -- for Grip Inc., whose increasingly impressive discography has been met with a collectively indifferent shrug from too many metal aficionados. Here's hoping Incorporated enlightens more to this well-seasoned, pseudo-supergroup collective, which seems disparate on paper, but truly is greater than the sum of its parts." (review from allmusic.com)

90s classic...

Strapping Young Lad - City

Devin Townsend is a fucking lunatic.

"A sense of humor is something that very few artists in underground metal possess -- and that's precisely why Canadian Devin Townsend and his wall-of-noise industrial-thrash outfit Strapping Young Lad stand out amongst the melee. City is a fine example of Townsend's metal-mad scientist approach (dubbed "Devy metal" by affectionate followers): An absolutely manic cyber-grind propelled by the elephant stampede kicked up by drummer extraordinaire Gene Hoglan (ex-Death, Dark Angel), thickened by frenzied, nigh out of control guitar riffs and existing in a cloudy electro-haze of pulverized circuit boards crushed to dust, shot into the atmosphere, and breathed in by all involved parties. So this album's predecessor, Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing, was appropriately titled, although City is a smidgen more focused, mature, and, yes, heavy, although Townsend's subsequent solo projects, Ocean Machine, Infinity, Physicist, and Terria, are less overtly metallic, more fully realized, prog-influenced, and ambitious. What makes Strapping Young Lad most compelling isn't the band's capacity for schizoid arrangements, but rather Townsend's realization that the over the top clichés of the metal genre -- which he robustly embraces with a maniacal grin -- are innately absurd. So he trots out irony-packed tunes such as "Oh My Fucking God," "All Hail the New Flesh," and "AAA" with such ridiculous bombast and bizarre, borderline non sequitur lyrics (a quick sample: "Devy in the corner of his teen year/Born to run away/Children in the middle with the village idiot/So he never made the potty grade" from "AAA"), all used to skewer the inherent ludicrousness of not just metal, but life in general. On the surface, City is a noisy excuse to put yourself in a neck brace, but closer inspection will reveal Townsend's mentally depraved genius, his mind weighted down with, um, really heavy things."(review from allmusic.com)

Thrash is not dead...yet

Evile-Enter The Grave (2007)

This album is a straight forward thrash album,it has everything you can expect from one :speed,horror and brutality.

"TTTHHHRRRAAASSSHHH!!! When you have a band member wearing an ONSLAUGHT shirt in the back cover of the promo copy...well, let�s start with a 6/10 grade by default (even if the CD is blank inside), huh! I don�t know if there actually is a UK New Thrash Wave floating round in the island (I�d be informed by now...) but with EVILE and "Enter The Grave" let�s start one (again), you muthas!

Britain is honored to have developed most (if not all) Metal styles. It is also pointed as diminishing them after some years, to develop the next one(s). Anyway, in �extreme� Metal terms there are not much to chat about UK�s contribution since names like ONSLAUGHT, ACID REIGN, SABBAT, XENDRIX, WARFARE and (influential or influenced) VENOM, NAPALM DEATH and CARCASS speak for themselves. EVILE breath life for not more than a handful of years but seem rather confident for a first album and - if things move on naturally - Britain has just obtained another Thrash star.

The Drake brothers have done a helluva job in the guitars section, with tons of old-school riffs spreading like hell, accompanied y demonic soloing and firing leads. Matt�s hands are more than steady, bringing on headbanging chords while Ol has studied a lot his lessons in violence �penned� by his favorite 80s Thrash Metal teachers. As regards the rhythm section, Mike Alexander is 100% pounding (even if I�d like his work to be more in-the-front) while few can be said �bout Ben Carter�s drumming. Complex yet imminent, powerful but sharp, he likes Dave Lombardo a lot and he�s a strong �ace� in the band�s ranks.

The songs themselves will fulfill your 80s Thrash needs by default. Riffs, breaks, grooves, speed, evil singing, lunacy, mid-tempo moshing, soloing paranoia, extreme harmonies, etc. No tune stands way ahead from the others, but I did bang my head endlessly to the monstrosity of "Thrasher", "Man Against Machine" and "Armoured Assault". EVILE perform great music that sounds fresh enough, even if bringing mega bands like SLAYER (mainly), ANNIHILATOR, (old) METALLICA, (mid) SEPULTURA, SACRED REICH and (80s) EXODUS to mind. One reason for this result being the band�s intelligence in avoiding the �retro� trap by demonstrating enhanced individual playing, the other one (and a strong promotional tool) can as well be the man in charge of "Enter The Grave"�s production. Flemming Rasmussen (METALLICA, PRETTY MAIDS) handles the production and you will feel his magic touch first thing at night (when you should naturally listen to the CD for the first time).

August 27th (Europe) and September 25th (USA) are the dates you�ll be looking for your next �anticipated� CD release. EVILE hail from Britain, their Thrash Metal music is US-inspired and - with sufficient support - "Enter The Grave" can turn out to be a �classic� debut in the thrash Metal series of musical violence in our beloved music, plus the band (if achieving to remove some of the enough SLAYER components in the future) can eternally, from now on, fulfill our needs for pure...hmmm...huh... TTTHHHRRRAAASSSHHH!"(review from metal-temple.com)