Neanderthal has left his mark – 82%
robotiq, June 10th, 2021
Demolition Hammer might be the most brutal thrash metal band of all time. This is a band for people who want to catch the meanest riffs and the hardest grooves, while still being able to hear some great solos. The band’s debut album, “Tortured Existence”, is thrash played with a Florida death metal aesthetic. The grotesque cover art and the Morrisound production are death metal tropes. I tend to equate this record more with the first Malevolent Creation and Deicide albums than with contemporary thrash albums like “Slaughter in the Vatican” or “Idolatry”. This probably explains why I like this album more than those latter records.
Make no mistake, this is a thrash album. There is little (if any) death metal chaos in the music itself. The songs are logical and the progressions are pleasing. The vocals are gruff and shouty, not guttural. I wouldn’t even consider this ‘death/thrash’. It sounds nothing like “Beneath the Remains” or “Prophecies of a Dying World”. Instead, Demolition Hammer perfected the art of thrash groove, long before ‘groove metal’ became a sub-genre. There are elements of New York hardcore too, with backing vocals on every song. The band’s streetwise chugging gives them a menacing, thuggish feel, almost like a beefed up version of Leeway or the Cro-Mags. Another description might be: Anthrax jamming on Metallica riffs in Morrisound, with the vocals handled by a bunch of burly roadies.
The best moments on this album are the big, brash, chuggy parts that make you want to slam, windmill and mosh. A song like “Gelid Remains” brings this home in the most furious fashion. It begins with a “Master of Puppets” riff, and later borrows the breakdown from Forbidden’s “March into Fire”. Between these two points are sinuous thrashing sections that all release the tension at the right moments. This is ‘low-hanging fruit’ music. You don’t have to listen too hard. Many of the songs are identifiable by a vocal hook that revolves around the song-title. This music comes for you, swaggering like a bouncer in an alleyway outside a dodgy nightclub. There is little subtlety, and you shouldn’t expect subtlety from a band named ‘Demolition Hammer’ anyway.
The band’s best trait is their instinctive ability to ride a riff. There are tons of examples, but my favourites are the entirety of “Neanderthal” (essentially one long groove with some tasteful solos near the end), and the middle of “Cataclysm” (i.e., the breakdown after the “Retreat to the equator!” chant). I’m not sure if I’ve heard chugging as mammoth as this, ever. Oddly, this song only appears on the CD version and it is probably my favourite song on here. I also like the speedier, hardcore-influenced tracks like “Hydrophobia” and “Mercenary Aggression”. Then there are the tracks that both chug hard and cut loose, like “Infectious Hospital Waste” for example. The whole album is packed with goodness. It sounds amazing when approached on its own terms.
Unfortunately, bands like Demolition Hammer had little impact on the wider metal scene. Records like “Altars of Madness” and “Deicide” had already been released by the time “Tortured Existence” came out. This is telling. No matter how good this album was, it was never at the cutting edge. Metal history circumvented this kind of brutal thrash in favour of the more extreme, chaotic death metal sound. The fact that Demolition Hammer could hold their own against those bands shows something in itself (the band subsequently toured with Massacre and Grave in 1992). “Tortured Existence” may be caught between two worlds, but it succeeds through brute force. The thrash revival of recent years has breathed new life into records like this (and Morbid Saint’s “Spectrum of Death”). I can understand why, they are awesome.
rafazardly 