Loads of newer bands have been juicing up their hardcore thrash with some straight up rock lately, but few do it as well as the mighty Annihilation Time, whose latest album III on Tee Pee completely kicked my ass earlier this year. These Cali rippers combine old-school hardcore and classic 70's hard rock/proto-metal heroics better than anyone, and sound like some mutant cross between the burly hardcore punk of Black Flag and B'last! and the infectious bloozy riffage of Rainbow and Deep Purple; sounds like a weird combo, and it is, but do these guys tear it up! I'm still playing III on a regular basis here at C-Blast HQ, and I've been slowly tracking down their earlier releases that came out on the thrashcore labels Dead Alive and Six Weeks. Some of this stuff is out of print or otherwise hard to locate, but I did just find the vinyl version of their second album, appropriately titled II, from 2005. It's just as raging and rocking and furious as the newer stuff; the hybrid of Black Flag/Deep Purple is in full form here, short manic songs that mash together skronky Greg Ginn style riffs and fast pounding thrash with yelping, reverb-soaked vocals, fuzzed out leads and fist-pumping rawk, with titles like "Too High To Die", "Fastforward To The Gore", "Yuppie Killer", and "Imaginary Mirror", and there's a killer cover of "Teenage Rebel" from British proto-punks Pink Fairies that closes out the first side. Nice! The guitar sound and production on this record has a killer vintage sound, as if II really was recorded and released back in the 70's, a lost hardcore anachronism that was only recently unearthed and discovered by modern hardcore fans. It's not, of course, but this record fucking smokes like few other hardcore platters of this era, that's for sure. And the album art is terrific: the front cover of the LP is a garish, hand-painted psychedelic collage that has the zomboid heads of the band members rising in a geyser from a gushing toilet while demonic skater punks hold the Annihilation Time logo aloft, tossing multi-colored pills over a grotesque scene that includes an undead Lemmy Kilmister and Phil Lynott, a skeletonized creep wearing a Blue Oyster Cult t-shirt with guitar cables pounded into his ear cavities, mushrooms, beer cans, dope-smoking sewer rats, and demonically possessed water bongs. That freakish vision just kind of sums it all up.