Monday, March 2, 2015

Sacred Reich - A Question


0:18 mark.

One might expect a track from Ignorance or the obvious choice of Surf Nicaragua, but instead I will take you to an obscure 3 track EP released in between The American Way and Independent. 1990 was a complicated time, thrash metal had hit it's peak, most of the best records the genre had to offer had already been released and many musicians were left wondering where to go from here.

Some decide to stick to their guns and blaze away at full speed, while others try a different approach and slow things down a bit. There is a fine line here, for bands of this era it eventually came time to sink (Testament's The Ritual and Overkill's I Hear Black) or swim (Megadeth's Countdown to Extinction and Anthrax' Sound of White Noise). Sacred Reich slowed things down a bit sooner than most, electing to adopt a groovier stomp more akin to Exhorder and Pantera, the latter of whom they would spend a considerable amount of time on tour with. 

A Question is a perfect example of this sound beginning to take shape. Phil Rind's lyrics here are mostly phrased in the form that the title would suggest as he runs through the gamut of life's most challenging queries, The cover itself even features Auguste Rodin's The Thinker. The riffs are meatier than the band's previous body of work, plodding along methodically with enough weight behind them to flatten...well...Auguste Rodin's The Thinker!

The rest of the EP is lackluster, the b-sides being a cover of FEAR's Let's Have a War and Who's To Blame, a track from the previous full length. The FEAR cover brings to mind a Ted Nugent interview that I read once where he referred to Pantera's cover of Cat Scratch Fever as "extremely caucasian". I don't know what that means exactly, because frankly Ted Nugent is psychotic, but I feel like its appropriate here. Uninspired and by the books may be better terms to describe it, but they aren't as amusing.

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