Details: Astonishing 1st album by this raging Thrash Metal band hailing from Spain. Awesome production and cover art by Ed Rpka which will please the ears of every fan of bands like EXODUS, VIO-LENCE, SLAYER, ANTHRAX, ONSLAUGHT... Thrash til death!!Review:
While many people predicted that the new wave of thrash wouldn’t last that long, it is still going strong and plenty of new bands are joining the scene every month. One of the relatively newer ones to come across my desk is Aggression, a thrash band from Spain that formed in 2005 and signed a deal with Xtreem Music last year. On their debut album MoshPirit the band plays your standard fast paced/mid-tempo thrash that is very riff oriented but unlike many of their peers they actually do it well enough to make an impression on listeners.
They may be from Spain, but Aggression seems to have taken more influence from American thrash bands than European ones. Many of the tracks on MoshPirit have a Bay Area sound as the riffs have that same tone and style to them. However, despite the fact that Aggression has a bit of a retro feel to their material this doesn’t mean that they are simply ripping off those that came before them. The instrumentalists do have quite a bit of technical ability and have written some cool riffs that have just the right balance of heaviness and melody. Things do get a little less interesting when the band transitions into slower moments though, as the instrumentals aren’t able to maintain the same intensity and variety when this happens. This is definitely something that should be addressed in the future, but it doesn’t hold the album back all that much.
Singer Pol Luengo may be a little too close to the thrash stereotypes for some people, but his vocals do fit the instrumentals well and do add an extra layer of energy to the band’s music. Luengo is sure to remind listeners of several of the prominent Bay Area thrash vocalists, but it’s hard to pinpoint one that he sounds exactly like as his voice is more of a mixture of several singers than one in particular. But what does bother me is the lyrical content and song titles, which seem to cling to the tried and true themes that the genre has discussed for years now. I would like to see the group come up with some ideas that don’t seem so generic as this could help them become more distinguishable in the years to come.
MoshPirit may not be the best thrash album to come out in the past year or two, but it is one of the better efforts to come out from a new thrash band. The riffs are impressive and the group has been able to live up to many of their inspirations, but doesn’t quite stand out just yet. However, they’re at a much higher level than other newcomers to the genre and have the potential to become one of the noteworthy acts if they continue to fine tune their material in the future.
www.myspace.com/aggressionband
Price: 10 euro
Availability: mail
