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BATTLETORN  Evil Chains  CD   (Megablade)   10.98


I will never deny the thrash. My early teenage years were almost exclusively spent blowing my canals out with the cream of the Bay Area crop, and East Coast

beasts like Overkill and Nuclear Assault. I don't think that I owned a single piece of clothing that didn't have the DRI logo scrawled somewhere on

it in black magic marker. And when crossover hit in the late '80's, it was the first real musical epiphany that I had ever experienced up until that point;

the oft-maligned blenderization of thrash metal and hardcore punk was, at the time, the most primal and aggro noise I had come into contact with. Then came

the late 90's thrashcore revivial in the underground hardcore punk scene, with the likes of Crucial Unit, What Happens Next,and Municipal Waste unleashing

circle pit carnage throughout the DIY punk scene, and I was in total bliss. Throughout all of this, my infatuation with thrash, speed metal, and crossover

has never abated, but the past couple of years has been pretty barren for ripping new bands. So when a disc as unapologetically, un-irionically THRASH as

Battletorn's debut crossed my path, with it's primitive penciled cover art depicting some kind of cloaked demon ripped right out of a teenage hesher's

trapper keeper, I could barely contain myself. Battletorn's blown-out, fierce as fuck thrash attack surprisingly comes from a minimalist, stripped-down

lineup of just guitarist, drummer, and singer. Guitarist Omid formerly played bass in legendary DC grind godz Enemy Soil, and he napalms each one of these

jams with a whirlwind assault of blurred power chord frenzy. Fellow DC area ex-pat William batters his drum kit into dust, and it's a total trashcan blast.

But Battletorn's trump card on Evil Chains is the presence of singer Beverly,whose rapid fire, high pitched yelling is beamed straight out of 1985,

hardcore style, and falls somewhere between a feminine version of Jello Biafra, the chirpy, staccato declarations of Melt Banana's Yasuko, and Poly Styrene.

And her socially aware but strangely poetic lyrics are way more interesting than what you'd normally expect from this sort of hit-and-run thrashcore. These

cats straddle the line between ragged retro Combat Records throwback and modernized hyperspeed urban noise power, and while this is a too-brief disc clocking

in at merely 15 minutes in length, the 18 jams captured here are unbeatably ferocious emissions of distorted, gnarly energy.