Crime Scene - Dark Tidings (2023)

Country: Belgium/USA
Style: Crossover
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram | Metal Archives

It's time for another transatlantic week, I believe, with each day covering something from the USA and something from the UK. This is something of a cheat because the majority of Crime Scene are from Antwerp in Belgium, including guitarist PC who put the band together to tackle songs he had lying around during COVID. However, while he's known for Toxic Shock, that's the Belgian crossover band of the present day than the German thrash band of that name that I know from the eighties and nineties, so the biggest name here is surely the vocalist, Jerry A from punk band Poison Idea, who are from Portland, Oregon. So hey, it counts.

This is definitely a lot more metal than Poison Idea, who demonstrated serious chops on guitar and bass for a punk band but never pretended to be anything but straight ahead punk. These musicians behind Jerry A lay down some controlled thrash metal, mostly at a slow to mid-pace but with some faster sections, so while his voice is recognisable, this doesn't sound remotely like Poison Idea. It's part of the point, I'm sure, because he's been doing a lot of collaborative work lately that doesn't play in the style he's known for.

I do prefer my thrash fast, but this pace works for Crime Scene and it works for the punk vocals laid over the top, which is precisely how they did this. The Belgian contingent recorded all the music in October 2020 in a studio in Laakdal, but Jerry A recorded his vocals completely separately, and at a different time, five thousand miles and six months away, in Portland in early 2021. I have no idea if they knew all each other beforehand or have got together since then to play these songs live, but I have to say that it sounds like they're one band in one physical space.

As a metalhead at heart, I'm always going to be paying more attention to those metal instruments than the punk vocals, but the Belgians are mostly content to sit back and play the supporting role, generating riffs and keeping the pit moving. Dave Hubrechts gets some decent solos but nobody's spending a lot of time in the spotlight. They're there to do a job and they do it well, cleanly in the technical, often chugging style of the Bay Area. They leave the attitude to Jerry A, who seems to be on point and in the moment throughout, whatever the lyrical content and some of that definitely speaks to neither being on point nor in the moment.

It's pretty clear that Never Stop, for instance, speaks to his time in Poison Idea just as much as the many other bands who found that they may have had all the talent in the world but came up short on discipline, losing themselves in alcohol or worse. It's not a hopeful song, kicking off with a dark line, "It looks like the same, same day when I drink myself to sleep" and doesn't get more positive as it goes. It's not an affirmation song, it's an illustration of a tough reality. It doesn't offer hope, just kinship, I guess.

And the rest of the EP follows suit, this comprising five tracks and sixteen minutes. Four are short but sweet at very close to the traditional three minutes and Never Stop wraps up the EP at almost four and a half, elongated by an emphatic ending that kicks in around the three minute mark and makes it seem like we're in a warzone, with sirens, feedback, smashing glass and repetition of the title that turns it into a sort of protest chant that we shouldn't listen to when our shadows hurl it at us. It's a powerful ending to a powerful song.

And that's about it, because sixteen minutes isn't a long time to do much out of the ordinary, with the genre not known for that anyway. This is crossover, thrash metal instrumentation with a punk vocal, so it's straightforward stuff, just done capably well. I haven't heard this style in quite a long time, because the trends are more towards more aggression, with heavier groove metal behind a hardcore shout. This is old school, like the early crossover bands I remember from the New York of the mid-eighties, and I like that. It's good to hear the style again as it used to be.

Municipal Waste - Electrified Brain (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Crossover
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jul 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Municipal Waste have never been the most prolific thrash band in the scene, but their every other year album release schedule slipped to every three years and it's now every five, with this coming five years after Slime and Punishment and that five after The Fatal Feast. What's increasing is the average ratings at Metal Archives, because each album released after Massive Aggressive in 2009 has garnered a higher rating. I'm not sure I can agree with that because Municipal Waste's brand of crossover thrash is ultra-reliable but also relatively predicatable. This is done well, because all of their music is done well, but it's hard to compare its merits.

For anyone not aware of what they do, the openers quickly establish their modus operandi and it's not one that they vary much at all as the album continues. Electrified Brain highlights how frantic their approach to thrash is, a speed metal assault with hardcore punk vocals that's over and done in fewer than three minutes, even with an intro, an outro and a set of swapped guitar solos in the middle. Demoralizer is a bit more metal, with even more Iron Maiden-esque guitarwork, but it's a song with a similar impact otherwise. Last Crawl is back to pure crossover, the vocals taking a lead over the guitars, and on we go.

I should comment on the lengths of these tracks, because they make those on yesterday's Soulfly album look positively epic. Only Thermonuclear Protection makes it to the three minute mark and Putting On Errors only reaches half that, with The Bite only a blip longer. There are fourteen songs on offer here and yet the album still only clocks in at thirty-four minutes even. It can't ever be said that Municipal Waste hang around.

The comparisons to draw are to the original crossover bands, so I won't even bother to list them, as they wouldn't surprise anyone. I got a lot of Suicidal Tendencies on The Bite though, with a dash of Overkill, a band that kept cropping in my mind from the thrash side of things. The most overt punk side is Tony Foresta's lead vocal and his voice defines the band's sound even more than the guitars of Ryan Waste and Nick Polous. Talking of Waste, he and Land Phil both contribute vocals here too, combining most effectively on Ten Cent Beer Night, deepening an already catchy chorus.

That song has a neat nod to the Scorpions at the end and I couldn't fail to catch a German bite in a prowling Accept vein on songs like High Speed Steel and especially Thermonuclear Protection. The latter may well be my favourite song here, even if Restless and Wicked comes as close to textbook as anything here, a two and a half minute blitz with rough vocals over tight riffs, the combination of punk voice and metal guitars apparently effortless but utterly effective.

And there's not much more for me to say, because Municipal Waste aren't one of those bands who might grow on you with further listens. They're utterly transparent about what they do and that's on offer on the first song, the last song and everything in between. If you like one of them, you're pretty much guaranteed to like all of them. Conversely, if you don't like the first one you hear, the rest of the album isn't going to change your mind. This is another short blitzkrieg of an album that will clean your clock in the best possible ways. If you're into that, check it and them out.

Cro-Mags - In the Beginning (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Crossover
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Jun 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

So many bands have emerged out of the shadows over the last couple of years, if not from completely out of the blue, but I shouldn't be too surprised to see the Cro-Mags among them, given how often they've split up over the years and how often they've got back together again, in one form or another. They have something of a reputation for internecine feuds, as if all the clichéd New York gang movies are somehow true to life.

This, however, marks an official shift of the band away from its incarnation under John Joseph Bloodclot, who led the Cro-Mags for the last decade in his fifth stint in the band, and to the band's founder, Harley Flanagan, who is now on his fourth. It was Flanagan who sang on Revenge, the band's previous album, which was released only three weeks into the year 2000. They've been gone from the studio, if not the stage, for a long time.

While some of the folk in Joseph's new incarnation of the band, Cro-Mags JM, have decades of service in it, everyone in the current line-up has time with the Cro-Mags dating back at least three stints going back to the nineties. I see Rocky George from Suicidal Tendencies on guitar; he was on that previous Cro-Mags album too. With Flanagan on bass as well as vocal duty, that leaves Gabby Abularach on the other guitar and Garry Sullivan on drums.

I first heard the Cro-Mags in 1986 when my favourite band had changed from Iron Maiden to Nuclear Assault and I'd become fascinated by the new merger of thrash metal with American punk. I'd dug deep into thrash but knew almost nothing about punk at that point. What I quickly discovered was that I was a metalhead not a punk but I did like a lot of the pioneering crossover bands, including the Cro-Mags, D.R.I. and Bad Brains.

In the Beginning is more of a metal album than The Age of Quarrel was back in 1986, with Flanagan's vocals deeper, more controlled and far more mature, and the two guitarists providing a real crunch. The punk side of the band is more obvious in the rhythm section. Just check out the energetic bass intro to No One's Coming, which is possibly the best song on the album and surely the most important too.

For instance, it's at that point that we realise that we haven't even been listening for ten minutes yet, but we're already onto track five. The band simply blister through the first four songs, none of which make it past the three minute mark and one of which only just sneaks past half that. Over the album as a whole, fully half a dozen songs wrap up in fewer than two and a half minutes. The entire run of thirteen is done and dusted in under forty.

It also shows some real imagination. Not only does it last long enough for a guitar solo in the middle, which doesn't remotely slow the blitzkrieg riffs and bludgeoning drums that drive the song forward, but it adds another sound later on. We start to hear more beats than G-Man ought to be able to provide and we realise that they're not his. It sounds like the band are rocking out in an underground garage and the audience is joining in by banging whatever they can find against the wall. As it wraps up, we realise that this is all in effective ethnic rhythms.

There is one longer song and that's also interesting, because it ditches the vocals. It's Between Wars and it's entirely instrumental for its almost six minutes. It's not really rooted in thrash at all and it's the drums that are most obvious, shining far brighter than the guitars, G-Man doing a glorious job as the apparent octopus behind the kit.

So that's two highlight songs that I've praised the drums in. I should point out that the guitars are generally everywhere here, providing ever-reliable crunch and riffage. The more we focus on them, the more we realise just how tight this band is. PTSD is absolutely textbook crossover—no nonsense, balls to the wall, bludgeoning energy—and so is The Final Test, with its fantastic speed up at the halfway mark; only its vocals do somewhere different, being surprisingly subdued for a not remotely subdued genre. I like.

The most punk song is probably Two Hours, which is vehemently up front and threatening. It's less a song and more an angry musical punch in the face, the lyrics preached rather than sung or shouted and the music slower as if it's background texture to something visual than the backing to a song. Is there a video to this one? If there isn't, there ought to be.

Not everything holds up to the best songs here, but nothing lets the album done. It's a powerful statement of intent for a band who haven't released a studio album in twenty years. Welcome back, folks.

Creative Waste - Condemned (2020)

Country: Saudi Arabia
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

If I could be surprised by anything more than the discovery that there's a grindcore band in Saudi Arabia, it's the discovery that they've been doing what they do there for a long time. While the founder members talked about the band at the tail end of the last millennium, they officially formed in 2002 and are based in the gulf coast cities Al Qatif, Dammam and Al Khobar. Whoever's in the latter is actually closer to Smouldering in Forgotten over the bridge in Bahrain as he is to whoever's in Al Qatif. Metal Archives has a note that Creative Waste performed the first metal gig in public in Saudi Arabia, so extra kudos to them. Shake the pillars of the world.

I'm not sure how much material they've issued in the past. Their website, or what passes for one, mentions four albums but Metal Archives only lists two, the first dating back to 2012 and the second being this one. Bandcamp has a short third from 2008 that Metal Archives lists as a demo. I do like the bio the band included on that page: "Creative Waste is a Saudi Arabian grindcore band. That should give you an idea of how horrible we sound." Nice.

Here, they sound pretty damn good. Their sound clearly comes from the early days of grindcore. Condemned is rather like early Napalm Death but not quite as extreme in speed, with riffs that are straight out of the first Discharge album. Other songs aren't quite as reminiscent, but both those bands come up a lot here. The abundant use of samples clearly comes from punk too, given that they're all social in nature, railing against a lot of common bugbears like wealth inequality and racism. I recognised Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky and that idiot at a Virginia public meeting who accused every Muslim of being a terrorist.

The primary reason that Creative Waste are a lot more like the Napalms than Discharge is the use of particularly wild vocals. They are varied, perhaps because vocal duties are divvied up between the two Al-Shawafs in the band (presumably brothers?), Fawaz and Talal, who were founding members and have kept Creative Waste alive ever since. Fawaz is also the band's guitarist and Talal contributes the drums but I believe it's their voices we're hearing.

I have no idea which is which but one of the voices is old school grindcore, straight out of the Lee Dorrian playbook, hurling deep guttural roars into the microphone, while the other is higher, wilder and punkier and is really a challenge to the the mixer's ability to keep him from blowing out the top end of the spectrum.

What surprised me most is how substantial these songs sounded. Back in those early days in the late eighties, I remember songs not only being very short but feeling very short. They were brief bursts of intense energy without too much of a secondary goal in structure. I remember being surprised when From Enslavement to Obliteration came out and rocked that assumption. These songs are short but not for grindcore, running in the territory of a minute and a half to double that. The New Apartheid, the only song here to make it past three minutes, feels like a more extreme sort of crossover that's far beyond anything Agnostic Front or the Crumbsuckers ever put out.

To me Creative Waste sound like a what if scenario. Imagine if the American authorities had managed to put Jello Biafra behind bars and kicked the rest of the Dead Kennedys out of the US. Imagine if they'd settled in England and got caught up in the early days of grindcore, consequently speeding up and getting more raucous. Imagine if they'd hired a new singer who came out of crust punk and wanted to emulate Lee Dorrian. And imagine if they hung out with a DJ who knew exactly how best to use samples. What you're imagining is something very close to Creative Waste.

Agnostic Front - Get Loud! (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hardcore Punk
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Nov 2019
Sites: Facebook | Twitter | Wikipedia

I learned long ago just how differently punk was seen in the US to the UK, a difference that's only got more obvious with the rise of hardcore in the US and its influence on what became nu metal and metalcore. The American punk I like isn't Green Day or the Offspring, but older bands like the MC5 and the Stooges, running through to the New York Dolls and the Ramones. The hardcore punk I like revolves around the bands who created crossover, such as the Cro-Mags, D.R.I. and the Crumbsuckers. After that era, I found grindcore and the slow stuff just didn't cut it any more.

That's why I'm happy to finally break my hardcore punk review cherry here at Apocalypse Later with Agnostic Front. I remember buying their second album, Cause for Alarm, back in 1987 or so, as a young thrash fan eager to explore the genre's roots. The songs were co-written with people like Pete Steele, who I knew then from the thrash band Carnivore rather than Type O Negative. In turn, members of Agnostic Front guested on thrash band Whiplash's debut album, Power and Pain, which is still a favourite of mine.

Get Loud!, which I believe is the band's twelfth studio album, isn't a mile away from what I remember from back then. It's short at just a whisper over half an hour but there are no less than fourteen songs. The half dozen under two minutes tend to be speed metal blitzkriegs. The, erm, longer songs, only one of which makes it past the three minute mark, are slower and moshier and are driven by punk bounce. It has to be said that the first mosh pits were at hardcore punk gigs, even if many of us gloss over that.

Unsurprisingly, I prefer the faster crossover material, but I'm digging the punkier songs too. While I attended a lot less hardcore gigs way back in the day, I felt some of the nostalgia in the lyrics of I Remember. It really was a brotherhood, even in England, where I was a metal interloper for a while. As long as I had a Motörhead logo visible somewhere on my person, it was OK because it meant acceptance. The pits back then were alive and we dived like crazy people.

Even while I enjoyed faster songs like Anti-Social (no, not the Trust track that Anthrax covered), mosh songs like the instrumental AF Stomp and up beat punk songs like the title track, I wondered at how Roger Miret's voice would appear to modern audiences. It's close to what I remember from back then and it works fine for me, but it's nowhere near the style that people tend to be used to nowadays, where hardcore vocals are vicious shouting assaults. Miret is somewhere between clean punk and hardcore shouts, with a little accent I don't remember, but he's easily nearer the former than the latter.

But hey, I've reviewed a lot of albums this year that are throwbacks to the eighties. Why should that just be a trend for heavy metal bands? Why should the punks opt out of that nostalgia, especially if they happen to be a band like Agnostic Front who helped create a surprising amount of what we might take for granted today? Without the New York punk scene, Anthrax would sound very different indeed.

The downside here isn't that its old school, it's that it's happy to be safe and relatively generic. Every one of the fourteen song titles sounds like it must be on a dozen different hardcore albums, from Isolated to Attention to Pull the Trigger. The music's good and the lyrics are good too but it's 2019 and there's so much obvious opportunity for Agnostic Front to, as they say, rage against the machine. They just don't seem to want to. I wonder why.

The Accüsed A.D. - The Ghoul in the Mirror (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Crossover
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 May 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

I'll talk a lot in my Banco del Mutuo Soccorso review (next up) about how many surprising albums have dropped this year, but this is another one. I remember the Accüsed well from the eighties, when they were surely one of the punkiest of the thrash bands out there, pointing the way to what would be called crossover but wouldn't ever be quite as outrageous.

I really dug Blaine's vocals, as wild and untamed as they were, albeit in large part because they were wild and untamed. It's telling that the names I'd conjure up as a comparison (beyond Sid Vicious) are Gary Markovitch and George Anthony, who sang for a thrash metal band and a hardcore punk outfit respectively, Blood Feast and Battalion of Saints. Blaine was the insane middleground between those two genres at a time long before it was deemed appropriate.

What I didn't know was that he and Alex Maggot Brain weren't original band members, even though they were there when I started paying attention with the More Fun Than an Open Casket Funeral album in 1987. The bandleader was actually Tommy Niemeyer on guitar and he's kept the band going ever since founding it in 1981. In 2005, however, a year shy of a silver anniversary, the entire rest of the band left Tommy behind to form Toe Tag, which seems to have evolved into being the Accüsed A.D. After all, they included three quarters of the Accüsed and fans even prompted them to tour as an Accüsed "tribute band" called Martha's Revenge.

This is a fun album but it's wildly inconsistent, veering not just between punk and metal and back again, sometimes within the same track, but into a series of nods to classic rock. I know I'm hearing things here that aren't always deliberate, like the sliver of Armageddon that ends Prison Gig, but I'm sure that some of them are, like the Black Sabbath homage in the middle of Dirt Merchant. Why do I know the solo in Looking for the Smell?

It ought to easy to see which tracks fit on which side of that punk/metal borderline just by looking at the lengths of the tracks. The first dozen songs amount to less than half an hour between them, four of them under a minute and a half each, but they're not always the blitzkrieg punk songs. Hate Your Friends isn't Eating Teeth and vice versa. The four three minute songs aren't always the slower metal songs either.

We might think it would be safer to look at the song titles, with the more outrageous ones surely being closer to being the punk tracks. Well, Hate Your Friends is absolutely a rapid fire punk song, so much so that it feels too long at 1:29. However, A Piss Boner and a Handful of Dirty Words (and that's one song rather than two) feels akin to a band of drunks attempting instrumental NWOBHM at one in the morning.

Much of it is just the Accüsed, with songs like A Terrible Tail about all sorts of traditional material for horror movies. However, there are a few anomalies here, most obviously the five minute final track, The Comfort of Death (When Tomorrow Never Comes), another chugging Sabbath-inspired song (until it isn't), and a suitably outrageous take on Rick Derringer's Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo. Let's just say that this version wouldn't have made the charts in 1973 but in all the right ways.

I'm glad that Blaine, Steve and Alex are back under a vaguely reminiscent moniker. However, I'm even more intrigued by the fact that I hadn't known about Toe Tag at all and they knocked out a couple of albums earlier this decade, along with a slew of split releases and EPs. A lot of these bands may be coming back out of nowhere but some of them turn out to have been here throughout, just under different names.