Bonded By Blood's Thrash Revival

Posted by Paul Travers May 24, 2008

The thrash revival continues apace as Bonded By Blood release their debut full-length album Feed The Beast on Earache. Named after the classic Exodus album and playing a snarling, snapping old-school brand of metal that owes much to the Bay Area scene of the mid-80s, the Californians are set to join the likes of Evile, Fueled By Fire, S.S.S. and Municipal Waste in the vanguard of the new thrash pack.

The album fizzes by with a surfeit of aggression and youthful energy – ironic considering the musical template it uses is more than 20 years old – but is this much-heralded thrash revival really such a great thing? One school of thought is that such backward-looking tendencies stifle creativity: that a new generation really ought to be making their own noise rather than recycling music their parents might have been slamming to two decades ago. Another is that good music remains good music and personally I lean towards the latter idea. Music has never been so diverse, fluid or easily accessible and a bunch of kids dressing in sleeveless denims and white retro hi-tops whilst thrashing out riffs disinterred from metal’s murky past isn’t going to prevent the more adventurous minded from treading their own paths.

Besides, these things tend to happen in cycles, whether in metal, punk, pop or any other genre you might care to mention. And twenty years seems to be the average wavelength, meaning we can all look forward to a Limp Bizkit flavoured nu-nu-metal revival in about 2019.

Hopefully I’ll have gone deaf by then.