Thrash hard! If you want… – 60%
The_Boss, September 30th, 2007
This is my first introduction to Hirax, I’ve been meaning to check them out for ages since I’ve heard endlessly how they are an underrated thrash band and being a huge thrash fan myself I finally decided to look for some material. This EP was my the first thing I came around to finding and while I like to start from the beginning I decided to just give it a go.
On their Metal Archives page their genre stated them as Thrash/Speed/Crossover so I was expecting something in near to early Anthrax and well my hopes were let down. This isn’t even very speedy at all – only one song has a semi-fast riff while all the others are mid-tempo. While this has its moments and certainly knows how to thrash at those moments it isn’t at all memorable, there are no parts that make me want to stand up and throw a knife at an old lady or make me want to headbang until I puke. I find myself nodding along at the riffs and my mind starts to wander in the middle of songs.
There are only 5 songs on here and only one worthy of being mentioned, the title song. It starts off with a nice thrash riff leading into some drumming and a guitar solo that grabs my attention ready to thrash hard throughout the song, but unfortunately it doesn’t deliver that much except with another fun solo and the lead riff is continued which is somewhat worthy of headbanging. The overall sound and music is certainly thrash metal and while the production is decent it tries to go for an old Sodom sound maybe and doesn’t exactly work making the drums sound hollow. The guitars crunch along with some mid tempo riffs throughout and don’t do much changing in variety at least. The bass is barely even noticed on this EP and probably could be purged all together.
The biggest highlight is the quasi-raspy vocals of Katon DePena which go for the vintage Exodus sound but he sounds strained often when he goes for the higher notes.
I can say in full confidence that this won’t be at the top of any 2007 leaderboard for releases and isn’t breaking any boundaries so I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone unless you are a hardcore thrash fan looking for thrash in the 21st century trying to sound like the vintage 80’s monsters. Assassins of War definitely has one of the coolest album artwork though but doesn’t accurately represent the music inside.
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