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Along with Coroner, Voivod, Watchtower and Mekong Delta, St. Louis shredders Anacrusis were one of the more imaginative bands to emerge from the thrash metal underground of the late 1980s, blending together a unique combination of classic power metal moves, gloomy post-punk melody (a pervasive influence that would later lead them to cover the likes of New Model Army on their third album Manic Impressions), moments of Sabbathian crush, eerie complex shredding and an arsenal of ultra ripping thrash riffs, all topped off with one of the quirkiest, coolest vocal performances that you'll ever hear out of a thrash metal band, courtesy of guitarist/singer Kenn Nardi; his intense, expressive voice would suddenly morph from a killer high-pitched howl into an almost ethereal croon in the blink of an eye, and no-one in metal has ever sounded anything quite like this guy. Although Anacrusis didn't achieve the level of notoriety of many of their peers, their strange, unearthly metal would become an influence on everything from the latest wave of progressive thrash metal bands to the crushing avant-garde heaviness of Starkweather.

Like a lot of the prog-thrash albums from this era that I've been obsessing over, Anacrusis's releases have been increasingly difficult to track down, especially their first two albums, Suffering Hour and Reason, both of which have been out of print for decades. After reuniting a few years ago for a show in Europe, the original Anacrusis lineup decided to re-record both of these albums in full, and they've been combined into the hefty double disc set Hindsight: Suffering Hour & Reason Revisited that was released on cult metal reissue label Divebomb. I'm generally not a big fan of band's re-recording their older albums, but this set has a couple of things going for it: the band members smartly decided not to mess with the original music, and aside from a few small changes to some of the guitar solos and other elements, these new recordings are pretty faithful to the original songs; and with twenty some years of maturity and experience under their belt, the material benefits from the band's gains in skill and musicianship. Add to that a cleaner, heavier production that's thankfully free of modern bells and whistles, and you get a killer new envisioning of some of the coolest, heaviest prog-thrash from this era, enhanced by the appearance of two demo-era songs ("Apocalypse" and "Injustice") that didn't appear on the original albums.

The first disc in the set features the re-recorded songs from Suffering Hour, the band's raucous 1988 debut. The original album was plagued by murky production and some haphazard songwriting, but Suffering Hour still had plenty of ferocious kicks to offer via the band's often reckless technical thrash, a sound that was only beginning to take form here as they started to carve out their signature brand of tricky riffage and dark atmospherics through their frantic, crossover-esque attack. You could hear some of those progressive/psychedelic rock influences creeping through on songs like "Twisted Cross" and "A World To Gain" as well as moments of crushing doom that crash through the weird arrangements, but for the most part the band was locked into an aggressive, down-tuned thrash assault with a plethora of AWESOME riffs, with the song "Twisted Cross" numbering among my own favorite thrash songs of all time.

It was with 1990's Reason that Anacrusis's experimental tendencies would really start to take flight, though. Pushing their prog tendencies further than before, the album featured eleven songs of complex, crushing avant-thrash with a stronger production than their debut while still having that raw, energetic feel, and the musicianship had grown in spades. Songs like "Terrified" combined ferocious thrash metal with creepy discordant leads, eerie doom-laden passages and odd riff arrangements, hinting at the kind of Byzantine math-thrash that bands like Watchtower and Deathrow were doing around the same time, but then the album would suddenly shift into the trippy prog of "Stop Me" or the sweeping dark post-punk-esque melodies found nestled within the violent speed and angularity of songs like "Not Forgotten", "Child Inside" and "Misshapen Intent", these awesome, unexpected Killing Joke-like moments seamlessly integrated with their ripping convoluted thrash. By this point, singer Nardi had developed a truly unique delivery, his vocals a mix of ghostly, ethereal crooning and terrifying screams, resulting in an awesome, almost darkwave-tinged tech-thrash vision.

As you would expect, the re-recorded versions of Suffering Hour and Reason are much more polished and lack all of that reverb that drenched the first album, but these new recordings still sound like they could have been recorded from the same period of time. Of course, a lot of that fraying-at-the-seams energy and looseness is what I dug so much about those original albums and was a big part of what made them sound so unique; while the songs still sound as imaginative and powerful as they did then, it's a different kind of performance, and I wish that they could have included reissues of the original albums alongside these new recordings. As it is though, Hindsight is the sound of Anacrusis performing at the top of their game, and these songs sound as amazing and as haunting now as they did back in the late 1980s.

Hindsight comes in a thick eight-panel digipack package that includes a thirty-two page full color booklet filled with liner notes (from both members of the band and former Metal Forces editor Bernard Doe), lyrics and photos.