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What’s the 4-1-1?
The New Jersey thrashers are back with their 14th full-length studio
album filled with their trademark brand of metal.
Genre
Metal
The Good
The music on the album is prime thrashing metal. Between Ellsworth’s biting
vocals and the powerful musical attack, I was taken aback.
You know what you are going to get, to a degree, with any Overkill album. It’s
not a bad thing either. Crisp guitar lines, superb work by the rhythm section
and vocals ripping your head off.
I really enjoyed the vocal delivery of “Loaded Rack.” Bobby “Blitz” Ellsworth
can just machine gun spit vocals out like nobody’s business.
What’s different here is that the songwriting is, to me, vastly improved.
The single “Wheelz”, is excellent. It’s a radio worthy track
without selling out to get that airplay.
The last four songs on the album really elevate the CD for me. They are the best
tracks on the release and they fully encapsulate what Overkill both is and can
do in their music. I’ve already mentioned “Wheelz” but “The
Mark 2:14” and “Play The Ace” can have anyone banging their
head and screaming their head off.
The band acknowledges their 20 year history with the closing track called “Old
School.” It remains crushing and doesn’t make one roll their eyes
with yet another “Hey we’ve been around for a long time” career
retrospective type of song.
The Bad
Three of the songs on the album just leave me cold. I didn’t find anything
to make me just die to listen to them again.
While this doesn’t have anything to do with the music, I noticed that there
were more instances of lyrics in the song not matching up with the lyrics in
the CD booklet than I normally see.
The Verdict
I LOVE the band’s 1989 album The Years of Decay. My love for that
CD has been a problem for each successive album Overkill has released since
then. I’ve never found more than a couple of songs on each album that
came close to matching the creative heights of that CD.
I always felt that the band had far too many “filler” tracks rather
than really good songs.
I’m very happy to report that is no longer the case. This album has grabbed
me by the throat and throttled me until I said “Uncle!”It’s a superb dose of thrash metal, and we all can do with a little bit
of thrashing in our lives.
Did You Know?
Drummer Tim Mallare left the group soon after the release of this album, and
was replaced by former Hades drummer Ron Lipnicki. Bassist D.D. Verni and vocalist
Bobby “Blitz” Ellsworth are the
only remaining original members of the band after more than 20 years together.
Rating:  out
of 5
-- Jay Roberts
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OVERKILL
