An obscurity from the glory days of the Bay Area thrash metal scene, Blind Illusion's The Sane Asylum was one of the weirdest records to ever come out of the Bay Area thrash underground, although it�s weirdness has been overshadowed by the fact that the album features the team of Larry LaLonde and Les Claypool, who would go on to form Primus after leaving Blind Illusion soon after it�s release. Unsurprisingly, The Sane Asylum has been mostly relegated to the footnotes in the history of Primus, but anyone into left-field thrash/speed metal from this era will want to check this out, because it doesn�t really sound like anything else that I�ve heard come out of the thrash scene. The original release has been out of print for years like most of the records that came out during this period, and although I�d known of its existence for years, I never got around to actually hearing it until it was recently reissued. Since then, this whacked-out album has become one of my favorite late 80's prog/weirdo thrash records, right up there with the likes of Sadus, Heathen, and Mordred. The Sane Asylum was the one and only album from the band, released in 1988 on Combat Records after almost a decade of activity in and around the Bay Area; when Blind Illusion first started out in the late 70�s, the band was just another heavy progressive rock outfit, but as they trudged forward into the 1980�s, they gradually morphed into a warped thrash metal outfit with an ever changing lineup of members revolving around bandleader Mark Biedermann (who would later go on to play guitar on another crucial Bay Area prog-thrash album, Heathen's Victims Of Deception, as well as playing briefly with Blue Oyster Cult). By the time that Blind Illusion came together to finally record their debut, the band had taken on former Possessed guitarist LaLonde and bass virtuoso Claypool, whose respective styles can be heard all over the album. What they ended up with was a wickedly bent slab of weirdo thrash that combined prog arrangements, echo-chamber vocals and weird psychedelic sounds with blazing, convoluted thrash metal, occasionally tossing in bits of oddball funk, bizarre fx, piano, and even Hammond organ and a children's choir on the song "Metamorphosis Is A Monster". More than anything though, it sounds like these guys were really into Rush, and you can hear that influence all throughout the sprawling prog-thrash epics like "Death Noise" and in Claypool's frequent and prominent bass work; the songs are made up of numerous sections, moving unpredictably from one time signature to the next, and often veer off into complex jams and shredfests like on "Vengeance Is Mine" and "Smash the Crystal". The mix of Rush, thrash metal, and weirdo fx turns this into one the weirdest 80's thrash metal albums ever. I really dug this, unsurprisingly, but it�s definitely of most interest to fans of more adventurous, eccentric 80�s metal; traditional thrash fans might find Blind Illusion just a little too weird. Metal Mind Productions gave this their deluxe re-mastered collector's edition treatment, presenting it in digipack packaging that features an eight page booklet with new liner notes, and released in a machine numbered edition of 2,000 copies.