familiar, self-agrandising thrash anthems – 73%
Abominatrix, October 30th, 2007
It’s strange that I should describe a barrel-full of frenetic riffs and venom-spewing vocalisations as “cozy”, and I’m actually a little non-plussed myself to find that word so easily springing to mind, but there’s no escaping it: Witchtrap gives a pleasant feeling in the gut, like coming home to a tall, frosty glass of your favourite stalwart English ale and feeling its smooth hop-ridden texture and bitter-sweet flavour sliding effortlessly down the gullet. Witchtrap doesn’t advance metal in the slightest, and they don’t pretend to. What they’re about is straight-forward, sincere thrash with a definite 1980s aesthetic and communicating their obvious love for this style to their fans through a plethora of catchy vocal lines honed for the live (or party) environment, nimble riffs that verge heavy metal and rock’s melodic sensibility with the rapid-fire punches of thrash, and exactly the drum patterns you expect to hear.
One thing that this record does rather well, perhaps even better than Witchtrap’s previous LP, is convey the feeling that this music came not from the modern-day digital studio with limitless tracking capability and a producer dead-set on normalising everything to peak level, but from some musty vault left hermetically sealed since 1985 and broken open over twenty years later so that these shambling miscreants can prepare to wreck your town. Whether this is a positive atribute or not depends on how much more than sincerity and zeal you really expect from your music. Unfortunately, though this does sound definitively un-modern, it’s also a little bit on the subdued and thin-sounding side, though this only extends as far as the actual sound production and certainly doesn’t suggest that Witchtrap are a bunch of short-haired and bright-eyed prep-school juice quaffers from Bogota. Everything is very audible and clear, and as this is decidedly not your typical 2006 recording job, that clarity even includes the bass-work of one Edison Gil. The drums have that decidedly natural but somewhat muted pffft pfffft” sound you expect to hear from a low-budget 1980s thrash album (think “Show No mercy”) and the vocals are very much at the front of the mix. Those vocals are delivered in a sharp, nasally accented biting rasp that makes every word of the self-obsessed lyrics very audible, and this Axe Ripper handles the guitar as well, so you could say that he’s the star of the match. His strengths (indeed, the strength of the band) is in creating memorable but simple riffs that perfectly complement the gleeful bellicosity of the words barked forth from his disgusting, ugly maw (if anyone tries to ruin my preconception i’ll be very upset!) and slotting all this into the sort of bouncy simple thrash rhythms we all know and love. There’s definitely a German feel to this stuff, though it’s more Destruction than Sodom and even so Witchtrap’s approach to melody is more obvious and lacks the off-kilter weirdness of some of the early Destruction work.
Sample a track from the album; if you like it, you’ll dig the whole piece, and that’s an undisputable fact. It’s not that the songs are indistinquishable, but they all use a similar formula but for a few minor variations. There’s a surprisingly bluesy instrumental, “Forgotten Cemetery”, which leads into “Disturbing the Dead”, which I’d consider a highlight because of its stomping first half lunging into fast thrashing mayhem and those thoroughly catchy lyrics (“aaaaaarrgh! You’re messin’ with evil! You’re messin’ with death!”). “Metal Army March” closes the album on a bit of an epic note, as did the final track from their last opus, but the epic quality is mostly illusory and the sense is provided by the marshal quality of the riffs and the way everything grinds to a halt so Axe Ripper can bust out a guitar solo unimpeded by the accompaniment of the rest of the band. The song fades out with the repeated shout of “metal army march”, and provides an effect like a bunch of dangerous goons with boots and braces a-gleam inexplicably coalesced into formation (they’re obviously possessed!) and striding purposefully off into the sunset to conquer yet another unwary settlement with their metal fortitude.
While it may seem like a cop-out to some, this is really not the kind of release one can say too much about. It’s fun, catchy and epitomises a large section of thrash metal and its fans. If you don’t know whether this is the kind of thing that would appeal to you simply by reading this text, you’re probably reasonably new to metal and should start with the 80s progenitors.
rafazardly 