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Well—more
on that later, but the arrival of Kreator’s completely incredible,
absolutely vital best-of album Past Life Trauma into this house reminded
me of the grandfather of subcategories in the punk and metal worlds, the
category that began the blurring of the two genres and that Susperia’s
vocalist Acheron defined several times as his preferred description of the
kind of music his band plays: thrash. History will not record who the genius
was that picked the word “thrash” out of the countless other words
that might have described punk or metal played faster than usual, and that’s
a pity, because there are few subcategories that sport a more satisying
name to pronounce than thrash. It lends itself to complementary adjectives—thrash-metal,
thrash-punk—and opens on possibilities for musics that don’t even
exist yet—thrash-folk, thrash-polka, thrash-west-coast-trance. There
was a time when any metal band that played real fast got called thrash;
lots of people used to call Slayer a thrash band but Reign in Blood
was the last time Slayer really got loose enough to truly thrash. Thrash
metal generally favored dystopian themes but was perhaps the last metal
genre that could honestly claim it was portraying horror with a view toward
exposing evils in order to end them. Death metal often makes the same claim,
but five minutes listening to Morbid Angel will tell you all you need to
know: for better or worse, Morbid Angel writes about death because death
is cool.
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