Artist: Lifeless
Title: Lifeless
Type: Album
Label: Thrash Town/Pay For The Piano

Just the other day I was chatting to a colleague about new thrash acts, a debate set off by the online availability of Evile’s ‘Cult’ in which singer Matt seems to have turned up the ‘Hetfield’ dial to maximum. The debate was generally about how the new wave of acts seem to latch hard onto music styles from when both myself and the other party were young. That’s equally true of the eponymous ‘Lifeless’. However, rather then grabbing onto the longer more progressive style of Metallica, Lifeless sound like they have come fresh from listening to a non stop medley of S.O.D. and Suicidal Tendencies, albeit without the fireworks of Rocky George’s guitar solos, instead concentrating on the hardcore punk edge of skate thrash.

Twelve songs make up this CD, the whole coming in at just over thirty one minutes, so as you can imagine, there’s no time or place for bouts of muso shoe gazing. Every track blasts out manically fast riffs designed to get sweat and elbows flying on the dance floor. Opener ‘Judgement Day’ starts the album as it means to go, vocalist Nixon’s angry shouts being spat out over breakneck riffs and a battering of drums, charging from track to track with barely respite for a single breath as ‘Wytches Tyt’ and ‘N.S.S.’ stamp out with the same venom. The sound wanders for a few seconds into the realm of the blackened with the buzz saw guitars of ‘Crap Tax’ a bare minute of ferocity that seems to have fired off into the distance before you can even acknowledge its existence. This is far from the shortest track on the album, that particular award going to the forty second shout fest of ‘sXc’, a number that sounds like an escapee from the back catalogue of Lawnmower Deth. By the time the album finishes with ‘Born Dead’, at a near five minute length sounding like a full opus by comparison, Lifeless slow down, albeit at the start of the track, into an old school hardcore breakdown before putting the pedal to the metal in a fury of blast beats and punk attitude.

Nothing about this album is subtle or self indulgent, with a sound that should satisfy both punks and metallers and have spit and have them stomping in the mosh pit.

http://www.myspace.com/lifelessboro

Spenny Bullen

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