Strappado＜Silver Vinyl＞

Inattentive consumers picking up this album because they confuse it as being by the testicularly challenged American glam rockers will be in for quite a surprise. This is the Canadian band named Slaughter, and their lone 1987 album, Strappado (named after a medieval torture tactic that had victims suspended by their hands, while these were tied behind their backs), contained improbably raw blackened thrash reminiscent of the earliest works of Voivod or, say, Sepultura. In other words, there are no hair products in sight! Instead, Strappado's crusty brand of gutter thrash pushes past boundaries of musical decency in the same brusque fashion as Motorhead and then Venom before them. The hysterically frantic "Disintegrator/Incinerator" opens proceedings with all the subtlety of an electric lawnmower to the head, but the rest of side A is curiously dominated by uniformly slower -- though, for the most part, no less entertaining -- moshers like "Nocturnal Hell," "Tortured Souls," and "The Curse." Side B, by comparison, is full steam ahead; rapid-fire numbers like the title track, "Maim to Please," and "Tyrant of Hell" unleash machine-gun warfare before the concluding "Tales of the Macabre" finally decelerates the head-banging down again. Minimal production renders all of the above even more unpalatable for any but the most serious of metalheads, and it helps if you're old enough to remember the far simpler aesthetic expectations of the '80s -- where sheer savage fun often took precedence over perfect execution. Otherwise, you'll think Slaughter are just a bunch of hopeless amateurs. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia