Monolith was the final studio album from Amebix, and it has been a tough one to find in recent years. Released in 1987 on the British label Heavy Metal Records, the album has intermittently found itself out of print, but it now seems to be available once again in the wake of recent rumblings from the mighty Amebix. An immense influence on just about every single punk and metal band with apocalyptic leanings that has formed since the mid-1980's, Amebix had a huge impact on the sound of everyone from Godflesh and Winter to Neurosis and Sepultura. And out of all of their albums, Monolith is by far the heaviest and most metallic; coming towards the end of the decade like it did, the album feels like it absorbed some of the thrash and speed metal sounds of the time, the same sound that Amebix paradoxically helped influence themselves.

Truth be told, Monolith is also the one Amebix record that many fans in the punk scene derided as being Amebix's "metal" album, a blight that dogged almost every punk and hardcore band in the latter half of the '80s. But even the early Amebix records had a metallic edge to them compared to other UK punk bands at the time, and the band was influenced just as much by Venom and Motorhead as they were by the UK peace punk scene and the apocalyptic post-punk of Killing Joke, so hearing the more complicated and heavier gloom/thrash/crust of Monolith seemed like a perfectly natural evolution to me. It's urgent and ferocious, taking that combined Motorhead/Killing Joke influence that defined their signature sound, and making it heavier and thrashier, adding in lots of speedy shredding guitar solos and thunderous double-bass drumming, and the lyrics are some of the finest endtime visions that Amebix ever spewed: "I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream, They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird, Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine..." and "Meatwagon come, borne on the rays of the morning sun...". These are still powerful images to me. The songs themselves are more intricate as well, with huge droning riffs opening up into atmospheric instrumental passages, and the synthesizers and keyboards are more prominent than on the previous albums, and together with the spacey Hawkwindy effects that appear in songs like "I.C.B.M." and the title track, makes for strange, psychedelic post-apocalyptic punk-metal that was completely unique when this album was first released.

Plus, the album artwork on this reissue of Monolith is my favorite in the Amebix catalog, with its demonic mutant beast rising up out of the surface of a cracked and scorched wasteland, sporting numerous fanged mouths like a Giger painting on PCP.

Essential fans of Amebix's doomed post-nuke visions and haunting crustmetal!