OVERKILL: Ironbound

Released: January 29, 2010

Overkill have never really made a bad record, and as the years go by and peers and contemporaries falter and disappear, these dudes just seem to get better. Their 2003 effort Killbox 13 is one of the best thrash albums of all and while Ironbound doesn't quite match it, it sure as shit makes a pretty good effort. Anything that starts off with a twisting and turning, eight minute neckbreaker like "The Green and Black" is going to have something going for it, and Ironbound delivers the consistency and merciless thrash metal madness that Overkill has always stood for--in spades.

In the three years since Immortalis Overkill has probably toured harder and more frequently than at any time in their past, and that energy has transferred straight onto plastic. While Ironbound has that thick, heavy and modern production that their past few effort have possessed, the songs have an immediacy and a vitality that one would expect from a bunch of guys half their age and if you didn't know better you would almost pick them for one of the better groups leading the New Wave of Thrash. Bobby Blitz still screeches like a demon, and the now-veteran pairing of Dave Linsk and Derek Tailer throw up a never-ending array of violent yet catchy riffs, then fire off blistering leads like the best in the business. Here and there, some of the riffs sound familiar or regurgitated--"Bring Me the Night" sounds like Metallica's cover of "Helpless"--and there isn't much that isn't played at breakneck speed, but that doesn't really matter. Overkill started out as a punk band, and so for them it has always been about feel and intensity before anything else, and Ironbound strays little from that time-honoured path.

Only the strangely commercial-sounding "Give a Little" varies the diet from the pounding, intense thrash metal that is otherwise stamped all over this album. Ironbound isn't even out yet, and it's already in the running for Best Thrash Album of 2010, if not one of the best metal releases overall. I shit you not.

1. The Green and Black
2. Ironbound
3. Bring Me the Night
4. The Goat is Your Soul
5. Give a Little
6. Endless War
7. The Head and Heart
8. In Vain
9. Killing for a Living
10. The SRC

Rating: 94%