AUSTRALIAN METAL AWARDS

The Forum, Moore Park


Saturday night The Forum in Sydney rolled out the red carpet for the biggest names in Australian metal music. Tuxedo'd luminaries and their glamorous partners courted the cameras as they took their places inside at tables they had paid $450 a ticket for, and a who's who of celebrities kept the crowd entertained with music and comedy.

Like fuck. Sure there was music, and certainly comedy (at the same time, in fact), but instead of the nightmare that would make Cliff Burton turn in his grave and Dimebag return from his and rip shit up, the Australian Metal Awards was mainly a bunch of hard-drinking male metalheads and a pleasingly high percentage of hot metal chicks (including a couple of pseudo-lipstick lesbians who seemed to have made it their mission to flirt with absolutely everyone) watching some bands while every now and then some guy grabbed a microphone and yelled a bunch of stuff no one could understand that was, in fact, the announcement of the night's prize winners. The rumoured appearance of Phil Anselmo never occurred, but Ugly Phil O'Neill turned up for a while and even watched one of the acts. The focus was meant to be the awards themselves, but to be honest the attraction for most was the first (and only) performance by Sadistik Exekution in 10 years. There was a lot of bands in between however, so that meant a lot of drinking at the nearby pub for a lot of people who only came to see the headliners; but that's not to say there wasn't quite a crowd watching the festivities.

The Awards were the labour of love for Matt Willis and Natalie Meisenhelter, who persisted with the idea in spite of all kinds of cynicism and criticism and while technical difficulties on the evening itself forced some last minute changes of plan, things seemed to go rather well from my end of the beer can. Having the award presentation in the roped-off VIP section on the top floor didn't really work though, as no one on the levels below could see or hear what was going on -- it just sounded like a dude yelling things. Also, with Andrew Haug from Triple J, Ugly Phil from MMM, the owner of Utopia and Riot!'s Chris Maric there at different times of the night, I would have thought they could have been utilised as guest presenters. An idea for next year, perhaps?

Bane of Isildur and Eyefear were on early; too early for this reviewer unfortunately, but I did arrive in time to see Geelong's Death Audio. These guys have done some bigger shows around Melbourne over the last year including a few supports with The Red Shore. They're confident and have a pretty talented bass player but while their version of generic metalcore is solidly played and performed it is, to be fair, also solidly generic. Literally dozens of bands are playing this style now and as good as they are, Death Audio don't do anything with it. After them was Five Star Prison Cell, a band I love to watch but can't listen to for longer than a song or two because their time-signature free, 100-riffs-in-two-minutes, zero-melody mathcore spazz-metal attack always threatens to make my brain explode. So I headed outside and caught up with a few people including the singer for one of my favourite ever bands who was already quite pissed indeed.

The next band on the bill were the night's big winners. Despite not even having a record out yet and no real profile outside of Sydney, the death metal band Ouroboros picked up three awards including Best Bassist, Best Drummer and Best Unsigned Band. So they certainly had a lot to prove tonight, especially to everyone who kept saying "What? This guy's better than Dave Haley?" (Haley himself probably doesn't care all that much). Whether such comments are fair or not is really a matter of opinion; Ouroboros are quite good, they have a lot of presence and some decent if not-quite-original songs (one of them sounded quite a lot like Mortal Sin's "Mayhemic Destruction"), but they have still have some way to go before they're headlining their own shows at the Gaelic. After them came Asecretdeath, whose screamo/post-metal/noisecore hybrid didn't seem to gel well at all with many and it seemed that quite a few punters ducked back to the Fox and Lion for a while before the place got filled up with trendies and hipsters.

Chaos Divine followed, the awesome Perth progressive quintet who picked up no less than five awards tonight. It was doubtful if too many people in the room had even heard of these guys before this show but quite a lot of them went away talking about them. And they weren't saying bad things. Rock, death metal and melodic progressive stylings, Chaos Divine blend it like the best of them and should be one of Australia's biggest metal bands before too much longer.

Finally, after a long, long break, the band that almost everyone was there to see -- younger fans who'd never seen them play, older fans who wanted to see them again and curious others who wanted to find out what the fuss was about -- finally came on. If Chaos Divine were the sublime, then Sadistik Exekution were the ridiculous. It may have been ten years since they've played last, but they haven't changed a bit, except that perhaps Rok gets crazier with age. Dave Slave has always billed himself as the mental one of the band (and that's saying a lot), but Rok was off the fucking planet tonight, crawling around on his knees and slapping himself constantly in the head while making spastic noises, ranting and raving, swearing and generally behaving in a totally unhinged fashion. Musically of course, they were as terrible as a band that proudly announces themselves as "the most fucked band in the world" could be, although there were some surprisingly coherent moments like the doomy opener. But they were hilarious. I could hardly stop laughing from the moment they began. Rok was so berzerk that it was difficult to pay attention to what the others were doing and it almost seemed as if the band was having the same trouble sometimes.

Reaction from punters was intriguing. "I can't believe I paid $45 to see this shit!" said one friend. "This is the worst band I've ever seen!" said another, then left. "Does he ever say anything else?" I was asked by one young metaller when Sad Ex had played yet another song where all the lyrics sounded like "Death! Fukk! Metal! Kill! Fukk! Death!" I only smiled. At the end, they played "The Magus" and finally seemed to actually click as a band instead of just four guys making a fuckload of noise. Rok went crazy and Kriss Hades slashed his guitar strings and then smashed the instrument to pieces. It was nuts. Outside afterwards, people didn't seem to know whether they had just seen a very strange band or a very strange circus when really, it was kinda both.

Some of the winners and a few of the bands left people aghast, but aside from the technical hitches the night seemed to be something of a success. Hopefully some of the cynics and critics can shut up now and help out in 2010. With the mountain of killer Australian metal releases that have come out in 2009, there should be more than just a few winners next year.

• Best Metal Fan/Web/Magazine: http://www.metalobsession.net/
• Most Popular Merchandise: Psycroptic
• Best Album Cover: Psycroptic - (Ob)servant
• Best Band Name: Psycroptic
• Best Film Clip: Psycroptic - "Initiate"
• Best Producer/Recording Engineer: Jarrod Hearman (Sing Sing Studios) - Chaos Divine, Avalon
• Best Drummer: Dave Horgan - Ouroboros
• Best Bass Player: Michael Conti - Ouroboros
• Best Keyboards Player: Chris Stevenson - The Eternal
• Best Regional Band: Alchemist
• Best Youth Band: Asphyxia
• Best Export: Psycroptic
• Best Live Band: Psycroptic
• Best Guitarist: Jimmy Lardner-Brown, Killrazer
• Best Vocalist: Dave Anderton, Chaos Divine
• Best New Band: Death Audio
• Song of the Year: Chaos Divine - "Refuse the Sickness"
• Best Unsigned Band: Ouroboros
• Best Album: Chaos Divine - Avalon
• Best Overall Band: Chaos Divine

BON JOVI: The Circle

Produced by John Shanks with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora

Released: Yesterday

I'm not sure what "the Circle" is, but it could be something to do with the direction that Bon Jovi has been travelling for a while now. Despite some odd excursions into country-rock and deconstructive acoustic experiments (which, it must be said, was actually a pretty interesting thing for this band to do), most of the Jovis output has been pretty formulaic and predictable since These Days (and how many of us can remember a single song off that?). Have a Nice Day was their best album in a long time even if most of the songs sounded surprisingly alike, probably because the emphasis was on the good-time rocking out that made Bon Jovi so huge in the first place. The Circle isn't as successful at recapturing that vibe, instead trammeling a path of laidback contemporary pop-rock along similar lines to that of Bounce.

The Circle is very typical modern Bon Jovi, a safe, formulaic collection of straight-forward radio rock and heart-string tuggers that broach the usual Joviesque subjects: love, yearning and heartbreak, and workaday tales of ordinary people. The first two tracks are standard Bon Jovi, a sure-fire upbeat lightweight rocker in "We Weren't Born to Follow" and then "When We Were Beautiful" the usual balladic workout that is also from the soundtrack to the somewhat self-indulgent DVD of the same name that comes with the limited edition version of the album. In "Work for the Working Man", Bon Jovi revisits "Livin' on a Prayer" briefly (even stealing his own song's bassline) as he courts his Springsteen muse, but in the end he winds up a little off-target. The anti-war song "Bullet" is something of a surprise with its liberal use of heavy (for Bon Jovi) and distorted guitar and one of the most explosive solos Richie Sambora has pulled off in a very, very long time. For the most part however, it's all pretty innocuous and predictable fare: midpaced light rockers offset with wistful ballads, little in the way of musical interludes to distract the attention from Jon's voice and lyrics that are either corny ("Fast Cars") or direct steals from the Beatles ("I had a girl we fell in love/Or should I say she had me") or dozens of his other songs.

Bon Jovi freaks will love this because they'll be getting exactly what they want (and being married to one, I know this to be true), but most others probably won't find The Circle to be that exciting. I do quite like "Bullet" though.

1. We Weren't Born to Follow
2. When We Were Beautiful
3. Work for the Working Man
4. Superman Tonight
5. Bullet
6. Thorn in My Side
7. Live Before You Die
8. Brokenpromiseland
9. Love's the Only Rule
10. Fast Cars
11. Happy Now
12. Learn to Love

Rating: 50%

EARTH: Fear of Tomorrow

Released: 2009

It seems like ages since I’ve heard much from Earth although they’ve toured with Dismember twice and never really gone away. I’d heard rumours of something new from them for a while and I’m glad to see that rumour has become fact in the shape of Fear of Tomorrow.

In the seven years since the last album, their sound hasn’t changed much despite most of the band having been replaced in the meantime. Essentially, they are still very much about playing classic Swedish-style melodic death metal as crushingly as possible. The biggest difference is that the keyboards have been integrated into the music more seamlessly than before, when Earth seemed to add breakdowns just to accommodate them.

The keys work best in the two more expansive tracks, “Gagged and Bound” and the brilliant “Don’t Look Back” that features the album’s best dynamics and some harmony backing vocals from Sarah Jezebel Deva of CoF and Therion fame. On the rest of Fear of Tomorrow, the guitars truly dominate. Every song is a feast of catchy melodic and heavy death metal riffs and harmonised guitar lines in the Gothenburg tradition. It has to be said, however, that apart from the songs previously mentioned, this is a bit lacking in diversity. “Tomorrow” and “Terrorized” are short and speedy with the latter closing in on grind intensity. Other songs vary the pace only a little between fast and faster and the band’s reliance on the standard galloping riff patterns of early In Flames and Dark Tranquillity makes a lot of the tracks sound rather alike. It takes a second or third listen before the subtleties and vagaries of different songs emerge; for example there is a sprinkling of solos which the band has made little use of until now. Still, the catchiness alone will carry the listener through much of the album’s blood-soaked tracks. The hooks are immense and everywhere. The songs drip with them, and the precision playing and expert production erase most of the feelings of sameiness quite quickly.

Earth is one of the few bands still actually playing the pure form of this style and do so extremely well, so Fear of Tomorrow will definitely have appeal to fans who yearn for the days of The Gallery or The Jester Race and “Don’t Look Back” is without doubt the finest thing they’ve done since “Prophecy and Destiny” off their debut.

1. Tomorrow
2. Gagged and Bound
3. Banner of Death
4. Land of the Dead
5. Terrorized
6. Morbid End
7. Visions of Blood
8. Don't Look Back
9. Bloody Carnival
10. Human Carnage - The Requiem
11. Balls to the Wall/Seeing Red
12. Damned Forevermore

Rating: 70%

IMMORTAL: All Shall Fall

Produced by Peter Tägtgren
Released: September 25



There’s little doubt that this is the most anticipated comeback album of the year, and there’s none but a few who could honestly say they’d be that disappointed by it. While Immortal may have been taking the piss out of themselves now for a long time, it’s also clear that they’ve always been deadly serious about the music itself. The evidence list for this begins with the daunting and impressive packaging of All Shall Fall that borrows from Beyond the Gates by Possessed (a band to whom all groups like this pay a debt) and continues with Demonaz’ detailed lyrics and the blasting soundtrack the band provides them.

In short, Immortal may look like cartoon characters with their crazy full-face make-up and ridiculous spiky attire, but they sound every bit like furious warrior demons at the vanguard of Hell’s legions. There’s a sophistication and a skill inherent in their ferocious dark black thrash attack that belies their clownish appearance and Peter Tägtgren’s production enhances the feeling of cold, methodical bitterness, the aesthetics of pure misanthropic destruction.
Indeed, the clinical sound is what helps give All Shall Fall its immense power, turning what would still be a good track like the riff-infested “The Rise of Darkness” into a thing of pure menace. There is unquestionably something of a groove apparent thanks to the audible thump of Appolyon’s bass and Immortal has also put a heavy emphasis on dynamics here too as the mid-paced sections contrast drastically with the speedier parts when Horgh gets steam up. The clean passages in the likes of “Norden on Fire” –the closest they get to their usual Bathory-worship—enhance the atmosphere of malevolence that only a nasal grunt like Abbath’s can help create. It should also be noted that his lead guitar work on here is possibly his best yet.

While All Shall Fall has its thrashier tracks, it also has its frosty epics, closing with the immense “Unearthly Kingdom”, a grim combination of slow, pounding riffs and sudden bursts of speed; it almost sounds sad, which seems like a strange thing to say about Immortal but it fits the bill here.

Not everyone will be happy, but All Shall Fall is a strong album that bridges some of the gaps between Immortal’s early style and their later phase without really changing anything very much. It’s not a total masterpiece, but it could hardly be described as just another comeback either.

1. All Shall Fall
2. The Rise of Darkness
3. Hordes to War
4. Norden on Fire
5. Arctic Swarm
6. Mount North
7. Unearthly Kingdom

Rating: 85%

W.A.S.P.: Babylon

Produced by Blackie Lawless
Released: October 12

You gotta hand it to Blackie Lawless. Few people could have foreseen his two-chord-wonder shock rock hack act W.A.S.P. lasting much beyond its first couple of albums, and even fewer could have predicted the way the band not only lasted, but grew and developed beyond the infantile buzz-saw-wearing, blood-drinking, offal-throwing and misogynistic torture shows. Yet, armed with a modicum of real talent and an ambition, vision and drive that befits his enormous ego, Lawless has kept the W.A.S.P. fire burning now for 27 years. And if anything represents that fire, it is this, his band's 14th studio album and quite simply the best thing W.A.S.P. has done since 1992.

Flame and fire abound throughout Babylon's tracklisting: "Babylon's Burning", "Burn", "Into the Fire", "Thunder Red", "Seas of Fire" -- all kind of appropriate given the album's apparent concept as visions of the Apocalypse -- and the music is similarly ablaze with loud and heavy riffing, towering solos and Blackie's mean and demented vocal roar. There's nothing here you wouldn't have heard before from W.A.S.P.. The lead track "Crazy" starts out almost exactly like "Wild Child", for example, but this has an energy, conviction and direction that the group has lacked for a long, long time. "Babylon's Burning" is simply fantastic heavy metal that is up there with anything that could be labelled W.A.S.P.'s best and "Seas of Fire" is also a ripper. I've never been fussed on Blackie's more balladic tracks (mainly because he basically can't sing) but "Into the Fire" is also something of a highlight. The Deep Purple cover that was left off the Dominator album fits better into this concept. Stripped of the pompy keys and the funky beats, W.A.S.P. reimagines "Burn" as an apocalyptic metal song and does it pretty well. They even round things out with a metallized Chuck Berry cover that turns out sounding a little like Motörhead.

W.A.S.P. has been more miss than hit over the past decade and a half, but Babylon shows that Blackie Lawless still has a really good album in him when he gets right down to it. If you've been disappointed by his last few efforts, this should more than make up for it.

1. Crazy
2. Live to Die Another Day
3. Babylon's Burning
4. Burn
5. Into the Fire
6. Thunder Red
7. Seas of Fire
8. Godless Run
9. Promised Land

Rating: 82%

ARCANE: Chronicles of the Waking Dream

Produced by Jesse Higginson and Arcane
Released: September 21

As unfair as it can be to accuse one band of sounding like another, sometimes there’s just no denying it. In the way that Airbourne sounds like AC/DC and ‘neath sounds like Opeth, Brisbane’s Arcane sounds like Pain of Salvation. Being compared so immediately with such a prominent band in their field can have its drawbacks, but really only if your interpretation is second-rate.

Therefore, Arcane don’t have too many problems, because here is an extremely well-played and well-crafted concept album of melodic progressive metal that would easily stand beside any other album by any better known band of their ilk. Indeed, if there’s a major difference between the two bands, it is that Arcane’s concept clicks much easier than those of PoS, and isn’t cluttered with that band’s odious pseudo-intellectualism. This isn’t to suggest that Arcane don’t make intelligent music; far from it. It’s more like a comparison between Umberto Eco and Richard Dawkins – one no less intelligent than the other, but one is far more readable.

One of the album’s best tricks is that it doesn’t include a lyric sheet, thereby forcing a greater level of concentration on the listener to follow the story of Acolyte Zero, a man obsessed with May 26. Such a theme is dark, of course and with their sweeping arrangements, Arcane match the music to the words. Their hour-long drama mixes in flute-like melody lines in rousing folk-metal sections such as during “The Malice” and, very late in the piece, throw up some clashing, truly heavy riffs in the latter half of “Asylum: Acolyte Zero” and each main movement is broken up with an interlude piece. The highlight is the majestic “Fading”, the twelve-minute centrepiece that represents Zero’s final tipping point. Arcane fills it with dark and luscious melodies and harmonising guitar and keys, a signature of their sound.

Like Voyager's album, Arcane’s Chronicles of the Waking Dream is clear proof that Australia’s progressive metal scene is the equal of that found anywhere.

1. Glimpse
2. The Seer
3. The Malice
4. The First Silent Year
5. Secret
6. Fading
7. The Second Silent Year
8. May 26
9. The Third Silent Year
10. Asylum: Acolyte Zero
11. Whisper

Rating: 87%

THE POOR: Round 1

Produced by The Poor & Greg Clarke
* Produced by The Poor, Greg Clarke & Billy Thorpe
Released: October 19

The last half of this year has seen a veritable plethora of bands reforming for some reason. While some have obviously been nostalgic one-off reunions (Sadistik Exekution, Nitocris, iNFeCTeD, Candy Harlots), others are clearly reformations (Tumbleweed, Segression) that intend to continue. The Poor falls into the second category, and before even playing any shows (not counting the tour they did with W.A.S.P. last year), they’ve already released the first of what is apparently going to be at least two new albums.

The Poor is a band whose initial success should probably never have happened in the first place, a hell-raising heavy drinking hard rock band who scored a hit single and album at a time when such things had been made redundant by grunge. Fifteen years on from that 18 months or so of near-stardom, The Poor’s second album is a rather uneven collection of songs that for the most part sound like cast-offs. It would be presumptuous to expect a band that gets back together after 8 years to sound the way they did when they split, of course, and The Poor do not.

The first two songs play around in the familiar, brash hard rocking territory of old, but as an old fan it feels like something is missing. As the albums progresses, it becomes clear what that is. The tracks on Round 1 aren’t bad, but they lack the memorable hooks and raw, rocking power The Poor once had. In places I’m reminded of Lump, Skenie and drummer Gavin Hansen’s post-The Poor outfit that played around with grunge and nu-metal. While Round 1 never gets that far into those areas, there is a feeling that The Poor has tried to modernise their style a bit, perhaps a strange thing to do when their original style is currently enjoying a new surge of popularity thanks to the likes of Airbourne.

Round 1 isn’t bad and it’s good to have a pure rock band like The Poor back, but it probably just isn’t the comeback album some will expect, or want. When they start playing live again, most of the crowd will only want to hear their old stuff, so it probably doesn’t really matter anyway.

1. Kill My Faith
2. Death of Me
3. Last Laugh
4. House*
5. No One's Home
6. Prisoner of Fools
7. Don't Know What You're Missing
8. Love Isn't on Again
9. Guardian Angel (demo)
10. Can't Feel a Thing (demo)
11. Goodbye (demo)

Rating: 62%

SUMMONUS: Summonus

Released: 2009

Track five of this EP is one of the finest representations of diabolus in musica since the first song of the first Black Sabbath album. The main riff of "Two Lane Blacktop" is resoundingly similar to Iommi's evocative original with a sinister ringing note like a death knell as it creeps, builds and creeps again along its nine and a half minute length. With this track, Summonus creates the very epitome of down-tempo metal, and their five-cut self-titled debut is like a crash course in sludge: a newcomer to the genre could use this as a primer but they could well come away wondering if the Devil himself had somehow had a hand in it.

At almost six minutes of repetitive, reverberating guitar, the instrumental "Saturnus" is admittedly just a little too long, but Summonus makes up for it immediately afterward with Rod Hunt's caustic vocals carving through the distorted-guitar rocking vibe of "Down on the Reeperbahn". This clearly marks Summonus as a kind of less-chaotic Eyehategod, perhaps something in the vein of Iron Monkey but without the tortured shrieks of Mike Williams or Johnny Morrow. Hunt's vocals are still unsettling, however, the same inimitable mixture of hardcore rasp and death metal screech that he brought to Sydney metal pioneers Persecution. This is certainly not easy listening, even for those who may have an idea of what to expect. The songs are thick with droning bass and jarring dissonance but equally fat with hook-laden if bone-rattling riffs, and the glacial pace also adds to the daunting and uneasy atmosphere of imminent doom.

At 32 minutes, it's only slightly shorter than Master of Reality, and in the annals of Australian extreme doom should be just as certifiably a classic.

1. (Intro) Summonus
2. Down on the Reeperbahn
3. Grey
4. Two Lane Blacktop
5. The Gallows

Rating: 88%

SLAYER AND MEGADETH LIVE IN SYDNEY

Hordern Pavilion, Sydney
October 8, 2009

With two of the greatest thrash bands of all time playing together here for the first time, it was pretty unsurprising that not only was this show sold out weeks ago but the line to get in stretched right around to the back of the venue and halfway down Driver Ave. So it was impossible to catch opening act Double Dragon, who got a twenty-minute warm up set, and in fact Megadeth had already begun by the time I made it inside.

The sound wasn't the greatest it could have been, but Megadeth didn't let this impede them as they ripped through a bunch of their best-known songs, having kicked off with "Set the World Afire" that somewhat appropriately set the place ablaze. Each new incarnation of Megadeth seems to reignite the band, and after pulling the strings with Jag Panzer for a decade, new guitarist Chris Broderick was setting about showing how he fit into the machine. The closing trade-offs of "Hangar 18" were a perfect way to do so and the crowd were treated to a tight set of favourites with only "Head Crusher" making the cut from new album Endgame. Indeed, that was the only concession to post-2000 material made for the whole set, as Dave Mustaine led his men through a choice set of cuts from the classics (oh, and Cryptic Writings), keeping both the energy levels and the shred factor high. Mustaine's voice wasn't always up to the task, but he's never been much of a singer and the rest of the band made up for it with a dynamic and engaging performance. "Tornado of Souls" and "Head Crusher" were killer and for the encore they worked "The Mechanix" into a medley with "Holy Wars" for a rousing climax to the set.

Slayer took the stage after a minimal changeover and were as omnious-looking as always. For some reason they opened with the title track to the new album, a song that's only been out for about a week and one that almost no one yet knew. Even had they known it, the mix was so uneven and awful that it didn't matter. A band of this stature playing in a room like this should not sound so diabolical: the guitars were unevenly matched, with Kerry King blowing Jeff Hanneman offstage, Tom Araya's vocals were buried and Dave Lombardo was louder than everyone. Once the glue that held Slayer together, tonight the drummer was part of what made them come unstuck. He was all over the place like the mix itself. And really, Slayer seemed to be just going through the motions. It was obviously more than enough for their fans, possibly the most fanatical in metal, but their uninspiring and uninspired newer songs only got in the way of the classic catalogue, and even they seemed half-arsed. By "Dead Skin Mask" they were starting to warm up like the jets of fire shooting from the lighting gantry but the set was two-thirds done by then. Something wasn't sitting well with the Slayer lads tonight, but leaving off the scream in "Angel of Death" could well have been a precursor to Araya's laryngitis vocal blow-out in Melbourne the next day when he could barely sing at all.

The Slayer nuts won't agree, of course, but Megadeth won the night.

Megadeth setlist:

1. Set the World Afire
2. Wake Up Dead
3. Hangar 18
4. Skin o' My Teeth
5. She-wolf
6. In My Darkest Hour
7. Devil's Island
8. Tornado of Souls
9. Head Crusher
10. Rattlehead
11. Symphony of Destruction
12. Peace Sells
13. Holy Wars/The Mechanix (encore)

Slayer setlist:

1. World Painted Blood
2. War Ensemble
3. Jihad
4. Born of Fire
5. Psycopathy Red
6. Mandatory Suicide
7. Chemical Warfare
8. Ghosts of War
9. Hate Worldwide
10. Disciple
11. Dead Skin Mask
12. Hell Awaits
13. Angel of Death
14. South of Heaven
15. Raining Blood

MEGADETH: Endgame

Produced by Dave Mustaine and Andy Sneap

Released: 2009

Tonight Sydney plays host to one of the best double bills of metal ever seen in this city as Megadeth and Slayer unleash their hell one after the other, so what better time than now to take a look at the latest album from the first of those bands? Megadeth was always the most technically gifted and perhaps the most honest of the Big Four --Dave Mustaine has made no secret of the fact that when his band went corporate in the mid-90s it really was at the behest of his label. All that seems like so long ago now (which is true), since over the last decade of new label, a split, a reformation, another new label and several shifts in the second guitar department, Mustaine has drawn closer and closer with each new release to the ultimate vision of technical thrash metal excellence that he achieved with Rust in Peace. Endgame probably isn't quite the masterpiece that album was, but it is the closest they've come so far.

Megadeth leaves you with no illusions about what to expect. The first track is a three minute shred battle between Mustaine and latest recruit Chris Broderick, formerly of Jag Panzer, one of the most shred-obsessed metal bands of all. From here they lock straight into "Time Day We Fight!", another blazing riff and shred fest that pretty well points the way for the entire album. While Mustaine has never completely disappointed in the guitar hero stakes (even his worst records are saved by some blistering fretwork), Endgame is positively ablaze with glorious soloing, probably outdoing even the Friedman-era albums in that respect, and that's saying a lot. For those who love Megadeth purely on those grounds, Endgame will certainly not disappoint.

On other levels too, Endgame succeeds. In general, the songwriting is up there with Mustaine's best. "Headcrusher" is one of the best thrash tracks to have surfaced this year without question, "Bodies" embraces old-school thrash with the chugga-chugga riffs of Countdown to Extinction and "Bite the Hand" and "The Right to Go Insane" are backed by a wicked groove. Lyrically, there's a few clunkers (I'm not particularly fussed on "44 Minutes", for example), but it's clear in tracks like "Endgame" and "How the Story Ends" that the Mustaine worldview is no less pessimistic than it's always been. By the same token, he can still find a place for a song about top-fuel dragsters; the balladesque "Hardest Part of Letting Go... Sealed With a Kiss" really jars the listener out of the experience however. It really seems out of place on an album otherwise crammed with scorching thrash.

This is Megadeth's best album since Rust in Peace. It remains to be seen if they can top it next time, but we can hope they will match it at least.

1. Dialectic Chaos
2. This Day We Fight!
3. 44 Minutes
4. 1,320º
5. Bite the Hand
6. Bodies
7. Endgame
8. The Hardest Part of Letting Go... Sealed With a Kiss
9. Head Crusher
10. How the Story Ends
11. The Right to Go Insane

Rating: 90%