Rewind to the start. Jon and Criss Oliva got rolling around Tarpon Springs back in 1979, first billed as Avatar. When the brothers learned another group was already using that name, they eventually settled on Savatage, combining elements of “savage” and “Avatar.” Their 1983 debut, Sirens, holds an odd little footnote: it was among the earliest heavy metal albums recorded at Tampa’s Morrisound Studios, a room soon to become sacred ground for death metal pioneers. Primitive stuff, those opening releases. Still, the younger Oliva already played like a hurricane with fingers, a guitarist raised on the early Ozzy Osbourne records who admired Randy Rhoads and somehow folded Eric Clapton’s emotion and Eddie Van Halen’s agility into a tone all his own.

Here the tale bends toward glory, and toward sorrow too. A New Yorker named Paul O’Neill entered the picture in the mid-1980s and recognized something extraordinary in what these siblings were creating. O’Neill climbed aboard and helped rewire the entire ambition of the project. Gone went the exclusive reliance on the straight-ahead velocity of the early days. In its place arrived keyboards, choirs, orchestration, and elaborate storytelling. Hall of the Mountain King in 1987 flexed the muscle. Gutter Ballet, two years later, unveiled the art, piano and heartbreak colliding with riffs. After that landed Streets, a full-blown rock opera from 1991 tracing a troubled musician struggling to escape his past, exactly the kind of swing for the fences that most record labels would hesitate to fund.

So why did none of this ambition translate into stadiums and platinum plaques?

One culprit was a record industry that never seemed to know how to market the treasure in its hands. Atlantic pushed the group toward a glossier, more commercially accessible direction on 1986’s Fight for the Rock, a detour widely regarded as a misfire that baffled longtime followers without attracting enough new ones. Rock radio presented another obstacle. Savatage could deliver a powerful melody, but programmers often seemed more comfortable with music that fit neatly into an established format. Grunge then rolled in and damaged traditional metal’s commercial footing just as these Floridians were reaching another artistic peak. Pile on a sound too operatic for some metal purists yet too crushing for mainstream pop audiences, and a devoted cult following becomes the ceiling rather than a coronation.

Cruelest of all arrived on October 17, 1993. Criss and his wife Dawn were traveling along Highway 301 toward a livestock festival near Zephyrhills in the early morning hours. A drunk driver with seven previous DUI convictions and a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit crossed into their path and struck their car head-on. Criss died at the scene, just 30 years old. Dawn survived with severe injuries. The driver also survived, suffering multiple fractures and other injuries. Convicted in connection with the fatal collision, he ultimately served approximately 18 months in prison. The punishment seemed painfully small beside the life that had been taken and the devastation left behind.

Timing twisted the knife deeper. Edge of Thorns had surfaced only months prior, delivering the group’s first U.S. rock-radio hit and a fresh voice in Zak Stevens, recruited after Jon Oliva stepped away from lead vocal duties amid personal exhaustion and a desire to pursue other creative projects. Jon continued writing and working with the band, but Criss remained its unmistakable guitar voice. Real momentum, at last. Then it vanished in a heartbeat. When bassist Johnny Lee Middleton later entered the studio and spotted Criss’s signature white guitar standing in the corner, the grief became unbearable. Middleton turned around and walked out, unable to face recording without his friend. He would not play on the next studio album, although he eventually returned to the band.

What unfolded next is the stretch that raises goosebumps. Grief refused to bury the enterprise. Instead, loss poured straight into the work. Jon Oliva and Paul O’Neill chose to continue Savatage as a tribute to Criss, believing that keeping the music alive was the proper way to honor his memory. The albums that followed rank among the most emotionally charged recordings in the group’s catalog. Handful of Rain, from 1994, became almost a Jon Oliva solo project in disguise, with Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick stepping into the difficult lead guitar position. Dead Winter Dead followed in 1995, a concept album set against the Bosnian War. The arrangements grew even more ambitious, with haunting melodies, orchestral passages, and the kind of dramatic storytelling that had become the band’s calling card.

Tucked away on that record sat an instrumental that quietly rewrote the future. “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” welded familiar Christmas melodies to grinding guitars and sweeping strings, and the reaction surprised nearly everybody involved. Radio stations that might otherwise have overlooked Savatage began embracing the recording, particularly during the holiday season. Paul O’Neill recognized an opportunity to expand an idea he had been developing for years. Working with Jon Oliva, keyboardist Robert Kinkel, guitarist Al Pitrelli, and other musicians, the producer helped launch Trans-Siberian Orchestra in 1996. You can guess the rest. Those elaborate holiday spectacles eventually packed arenas across America, sold millions of albums, and became a December tradition that commercially dwarfed Savatage many times over.

Back under the Savatage banner, the creative run reached another high point with 1997’s The Wake of Magellan, an album many devoted listeners consider among the band’s finest achievements. Now sit with the irony. A grand theatrical vision that had struggled to find a place on American metal radio became a commercial powerhouse when wrapped in Christmas storytelling. Many of the same musicians, the same appetite for orchestration, and much of the same creative imagination suddenly reached an enormous audience. Devotees of the heavier catalog have mostly made peace with the twist, yet plenty still ache wondering what an uninterrupted Savatage career, with Criss alive and shredding, might have produced. Perhaps the group would have found its own path toward greater commercial success. Perhaps the music would have grown even more adventurous. Nobody can answer that question, and the uncertainty remains part of the heartbreak.

Even now the Savatage flame refuses to die, stubborn as ever. Following Poets and Madmen in 2001 and the end of regular touring in 2002, the band entered a lengthy period of inactivity. Then came Wacken Open Air in 2015, where Savatage and Trans-Siberian Orchestra delivered an extraordinary joint performance before a massive German festival crowd. The spectacle reminded longtime followers of what these musicians could accomplish together, but a sustained touring comeback remained years away. That finally changed in 2025, when Savatage returned to European stages for its first headline performances in more than two decades. The momentum continued with the 2026 “Prelude to Madness” tour, bringing Zak Stevens back to the microphone alongside guitarists Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, bassist Johnny Lee Middleton, and drummer Jeff Plate. European festivals and concert venues once again heard the music that American radio had never fully embraced.

One towering absence shadows the reunion, though. Jon Oliva, now 66, has been unable to join his bandmates onstage because of serious health problems. A spinal fracture suffered in 2023 left him dealing with persistent pain, and additional diagnoses of multiple sclerosis and Ménière’s disease have complicated his recovery. Back surgery has remained a possibility, while difficulties with flying and performing have further limited his ability to travel. None of that has extinguished his creative ambitions. Oliva continues developing material for a new Savatage studio album, long discussed under the working title Curtain Call, with the possibility of including previously written material connected to his late brother. Meanwhile, another piece of that history has finally emerged. Madness Reigns From the Gutter (1990), an archival live recording featuring Criss during the Gutter Ballet era, received its long-awaited release in 2026. The band has also discussed possible American performances in 2027, although those plans remain unconfirmed. Paul O’Neill, tragically, died in 2017, leaving Jon and the surviving musicians to carry forward a remarkable musical legacy.

So the throne stayed vacant. The platinum plaques, mainstream recognition, and award-show nights largely went to other outfits, some with far less musical imagination. What the Oliva brothers created outlasts any shelf of trophies. Guitar players immersed in progressive, power, and symphonic metal still treat that catalog like scripture. A whole holiday empire grew from the musical ideas Savatage spent years developing. And somewhere beneath the triumph, the commercial disappointments, and the decades of unfinished possibilities sits the memory of a young guitarist whose life ended far too soon. Criss Oliva never got to witness the full reach of the music he helped create. His brother has spent more than three decades ensuring that those songs are never forgotten. Mainstream domination never came. For anyone who actually listened, though, the brothers from Florida wore the crown all along.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Start with the guy gripping the guitar. Dave Mustaine got tossed from Metallica in 1983, handed a bus ticket and a grudge heavy enough to flatten a lesser talent. Resentment tends to rot a person from the inside. Here it did the reverse. That second full-length from the frontman’s fledgling crew arrived on September 19, 1986, and it pulled off what a raw debut had only gestured toward. Spite, aimed with surgical calm, became craft.

Ask any working guitarist about this thing and watch the eye twitch begin. Riffs dodge exactly where an ear wants them to settle. “Wake Up Dead” lurches through shifting rhythms like a drunk tumbling down a fire escape, yet every stumble feels deliberately plotted. Chris Poland, the lead player back then, poured jazz phrasing across the rhythm bed until solos resembled a saxophone arguing with itself rather than any ordinary metal fireworks. Gar Samuelson attacked the kit with a swing lifted from fusion records, not the punk stomp powering much of the genre in that moment. Down below, David Ellefson ran actual counterpoint on bass. Four musicians, no filler, zero concern for your comfort.

The title cut alone rewired what a heavy song could sound like. That opening bass figure grew so iconic MTV News swiped it for a theme, a delicious irony once you clock the lyric sneering at the very machine beaming it into living rooms. Mustaine’s narrator fires back at a society eager to brand younger people irresponsible, faithless and unwilling to contribute. Every accusation receives a sarcastic answer, from questions about religion and employment to whether ordinary citizens still have a meaningful voice in their government. Beneath the sneer sits a willingness to embrace change, provided somebody can finally offer something that works. The song’s brilliance lies in that combination of frustration, humor and outright defiance.

Words carried as much weight here as fretwork, and that gap separated this bunch from a pack of peers content to shriek about Satan and velocity. Politics, media rot, private wreckage, religious hypocrisy: everything got skewered using a vocabulary you rarely met in the pit. “Devils Island” reads like a prison memoir. “Good Mourning/Black Friday” compresses a slasher film into nearly seven furious minutes. Even the Willie Dixon blues number, “I Ain’t Superstitious,” gets hauled through a thrash grinder and emerges mean instead of reverent. Clever never meant soft with these guys. The cleverness only meant the knife slid in cleaner.

Now, the elephant in the room. You cannot tell this saga without the group that showed the frontman the door, and the whole thing breathes through that wound. Every scorching passage plays like a letter mailed north to the guys who slotted Kirk Hammett into the vacant chair. Look what I built without you. Metallica had gone off and cut Master of Puppets that very year, a genuine colossus, and the timing sparked a rivalry destined to smolder across decades. Here comes the part that starts fights at the bar. Puppets won on scope and sales, no argument there, yet Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? beats it on raw technical nerve, note for note, measure for measure. Nothing on Metallica’s masterwork twists and stutters with quite the same sick invention as “Wake Up Dead.” One camp prized the epic sweep. The other swore by the wired menace pouring out of the challenger, the noise of a man proving a point to everyone who ever doubted the enterprise.

What this album truly constructed, past any single riff, was an identity. Before that release, Dave risked ending up as a footnote in somebody else’s biography, the cautionary tale about drinking your way out of a legendary gig. Afterward, the world grasped the difference between two thrash titans. One brooded and towered. The other snarled, philosophized, and dared you to chase the fretboard gymnastics. Faster, nastier, wordier, funnier in odd corners. That eight-track statement drew a border and planted a flag in the ground. Megadeth no longer needed Metallica’s shadow to give the band a recognizable shape.

Four decades on, the reach remains enormous. The album helped establish a vocabulary that later generations of technical thrash and progressive metal musicians would continue exploring. Those abrupt rhythmic turns, jazz-influenced solos and tightly interlocking guitar passages demonstrated that aggression and musical sophistication could occupy the same cramped room without either surrendering an inch. Kids born long after 1986 still learn the title track the way jazz students learn “Giant Steps,” a rite of passage that either humbles you or forges you. Plenty of heavy records sound impressive until their production begins showing its age. This one still makes the listener work to keep up.

So where does the whole story sit right now? Fittingly, at the closing chapter. Megadeth’s 17th and final studio effort, a self-titled farewell released January 23, 2026, managed something none of the vintage classics ever pulled off. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 73,000 equivalent album units, including 69,000 in actual sales. The old warhorse topped the mountain at last. Cheekily, the record closes with a bonus cover of Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning,” a composition Mustaine helped write before his dismissal. He described its inclusion as a way of paying respect to where his career began. After decades of feuding, competing and answering questions about the past, that decision carries a weight no ordinary cover song could match. The man who spent years trying to escape Metallica’s shadow finally revisited a piece of their shared history on his own terms.

The goodbye run stretches worldwide and into 2027, with James LoMenzo on bass, Teemu Mäntysaari handling lead guitar and Dirk Verbeuren driving the drums. A 24-date European stretch begins in March 2027, bringing Black Label Society and Testament along for the ride. Mustaine’s memoir, In My Darkest Hour, arrived September 8, offering a personal account of his cancer diagnosis, treatment and the frightening possibility of losing his voice and musical career. Having fought his way through throat cancer following his 2019 diagnosis, the guitarist now faces another physical challenge. During a September book event, he discussed Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition affecting his hand that has complicated his ability to play. He has made clear that the decision to bring Megadeth’s touring career to an end is tied to his desire to perform at the standard he expects of himself. That knowledge gives every remaining concert an added weight. For the faithful who never wandered off, watching the man responsible for so much of thrash metal’s vocabulary take his final bows means considerably more than hearing a familiar collection of songs one last time.

Spin that 1986 landmark tonight and the fury has not faded a single decibel. It roars like a young talent with everything to prove and a lifetime of grudges crammed into a Marshall stack. That is a long time for a warning to stay this loud. Vic Rattlehead still clutches the sign. Somebody out there keeps refusing to buy. And that stubborn refusal, more than any solo or scream, explains why the record still refuses to die.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Most histories treat that split as a joke with an obvious punchline. Thrash was serious. Glam was fluff. Real fans, so the story goes, worshiped darkness while the mall crowd bought the pretty stuff. That version flatters the gatekeepers and misses what actually made Poison combustible. Menace comes in more shades than midnight. These Pennsylvania transplants proved a colorful, grinning, party first sound could rattle parents and preachers every bit as hard as any pentagram.

Consider what the doom merchants were selling. Sabbath had mapped the territory back in the previous decade, tritones and tolling bells and Ozzy howling about paranoia. Venom pushed the darkness into a name of its own, giving black metal its name with Black Metal splashed across a 1982 sleeve. From there the mid eighties heirs dug deeper still. Slayer sang of concentration camps and the devil. Metallica went sprawling and symphonic on Master of Puppets, eight minutes at a stretch about addiction, war, control, and a mind coming apart at the seams. Megadeth had Dave Mustaine spitting about politics, war, and a government he plainly distrusted. King Diamond took the theater route, corpse paint and falsetto and a full operatic Satanism nobody else dared stage with a straight face. Fear was the product across all of it. The bands wanted you leaning over the edge of something awful, half hoping it looked back.

So flip the record.

None of that gloom interested Bret Michaels, C.C. DeVille, Bobby Dall, or Rikki Rockett. Their whole pitch was escape of an entirely different flavor. Nothin’ but a Good Time, the title says it flat out, is a working stiff kicking off the boots after a lousy shift and chasing pleasure with zero apology. Talk Dirty to Me runs horny, cheap, and gloriously dumb in the best possible way. I Want Action barely bothers with metaphor at all. Where the thrash kids offered the void, this crew, forged on the same Sunset Strip club circuit that spat out Mötley Crüe and Ratt, offered a Friday night that never had to end.

Underneath the hooks sat a genuinely seductive lie aimed straight at bored suburban and blue collar kids. Quit the factory. Skip the pew. Point the car west and chase neon until the money runs out. Institutions built on discipline and deferred reward have every reason to fear a message that pretty, because a teenager who believes it stops showing up for the life planned out for him.

Here is where the easy dismissal falls apart. Selling sex and freedom in Reagan’s America was not safe. It was radioactive. The mid eighties ran thick with a conservative revival, the AIDS crisis was busy reframing hedonism as a potential death sentence, and Tipper Gore’s PMRC had already dragged the whole industry into a 1985 Senate hearing over dirty lyrics. When that committee published its roster of offenders, the so called Filthy Fifteen, sexual content dominated the complaints, although violence, drugs, alcohol, and occult themes were targeted too. Sex scared the establishment as much as any inverted cross. Maybe more, since desire is a lot harder to laugh off as cartoon nonsense.

Then there was the paint.

Look again at that debut sleeve. Four young men done up in blush, mascara, and pouts, so femme that plenty of people initially mistook the group for women. That picture went off like a grenade in a decade that policed manhood down to the haircut. Sure, the door had been unlocked already. Bowie walked through it, so did the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper made a career of the shock, and Kiss turned greasepaint into a licensing goldmine. What almost nobody had done was push the feminine this far out front while the amps were still cranked to distortion. Kids in nothing towns picked up eyeliner because four guys on an album cover made it look like the most rebellious thing going. Some fathers probably hated that image more fiercely than any Slayer sleeve, and the reaction tells you plenty. A devil on an album jacket only confirms what a nervous parent already suspects about rock and roll. Meanwhile a son who suddenly looks prettier than his prom date detonates something far closer to home.

Poison‘s follow up, Open Up and Say Ahh! from 1988, made the case almost too neatly. Its original artwork featured a demonic woman with a grotesquely long tongue, and the image quickly drew enough objections that later versions cropped the design down largely to her eyes. Notice what became controversial, though. The horns were part of the spectacle, but the tongue carried the real provocation. Even when this group toyed with the diabolical, the true offense stayed rooted in the mouth, the appetite, the promise of something wet and forbidden rather than anything infernal.

Musically the outfit knew exactly what it was up to, whatever the snobs insisted. The choice for Poison’s new guitarist eventually came down to C.C. DeVille and a young Slash, and no, you would never mistake what DeVille played for Randy Rhoads. But the man could find a hook the way certain pop writers just seem born knowing how. By the second album, producer Tom Werman polished Poison’s sound for radio and MTV without completely sanding away the sleaze. It worked to a degree that almost embarrasses. Michaels apparently wrote Every Rose Has Its Thorn in a laundromat, gutted over trouble with a girlfriend while the band was out on the road, and that little heartbreak ballad reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 at Christmas 1988. A crying song beat nearly every apocalypse the heavy acts could dream up.

The purists have never stopped sneering, though what the sneer really exposes is their own insecurity. There is this ancient bloodsport in rock over who qualifies as genuinely heavy and who is faking it for the girls and the record deal. By such logic joy disqualifies you and only suffering earns respect. Nonsense. Escapism is not the absence of edge. Michaels and company weaponized abandon, and abandon carries a tab, as anyone who staggered through the wreckage of that era can confirm. Something to Believe In, their aching 1990 hit inspired in part by the death of Michaels’ friend and security guard James “Kimo” Maano while also touching on neglected veterans, poverty, and disillusionment, showed the party crew could stare down real grief too. Then came the reckoning. DeVille melted down on live television at the 1991 VMAs while apparently impaired, the performance unraveling as the band stumbled through the song choice, followed by a backstage brawl with Michaels. That was the same appetite the band had been peddling all along, finally sending the bill.

Grunge rolled in soon after and buried much of the glam ecosystem under flannel and self loathing, and for a good long stretch it stayed fashionable to pretend the makeup years never happened. History reads fairer now. Scrape away the poodle hair and you uncover a genuinely radical proposition tucked inside the bubblegum. Loud, brash, unapologetically pleasurable music can threaten the settled order without once whispering about Lucifer. You do not need doom to be dangerous. Sometimes a wink and a smear of lipstick does more damage than a graveyard’s worth of gloom, and the sharpest thing about that grinning quartet from Pennsylvania is that every last one of them understood the difference.

Staff Writer; Terry Poole

This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…

One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.

Somewhere in Time was the title, sixth studio effort from the East London crew, and it showed up trailing gossip. Word had already made the rounds that Steve Harris and his mates had done the previously unthinkable for a group built on twin guitars and gallop. Synthesizers had been let through the door.

To purists back then, that rumor stung. Keyboards, in the eyes of a certain breed of fan, sat somewhere between betrayal and outright blasphemy. Anything cozy with the synth-pop flooding MTV reeked of surrender, and this outfit had earned a name over a long climb as the genre’s most stubbornly muscular act. So the risk was no small thing. Fumble it and hand your rivals a joke they’ll recycle for a decade.

Here comes the sly part, though. Rather than bringing a conventional keyboard player into the studio, the band used guitar and bass synthesizers to create those futuristic textures. Adrian Smith’s and Dave Murray’s fretwork, along with Harris’s bass, helped produce sounds that listeners had never heard quite this way on an Iron Maiden record. The familiar strings were still there, but the musical possibilities had expanded. That distinctive twin-guitar attack remained intact, even as the music leapt somewhere it had never dared go.

Put on “Caught Somewhere in Time” and you clock the change quick. The opener runs hard the way you’d expect, but there’s this odd chrome shine sitting on top of everything, kind of like sun bouncing off a spaceship. Bruce Dickinson sings about a deal made across hundreds of years, and behind him the band sounds like it borrowed gear from a future none of those East London kids had seen yet.

What saved the whole thing from gimmickry was the writing. Adrian Smith strolled in and delivered the finest work of his life, on guitar and on the page both. Fresh off that endless road slog, Dickinson had wandered toward softer acoustic sketches that Harris mostly shrugged at, and the gap that opened let him come charging through. Charge in he did.

“Wasted Years” stays the quiet miracle of the whole set, and the irony almost tells itself. That anthem, the one every crowd bellows back syllable for syllable, carries no guitar synth whatsoever. Straight, undiluted power, born from Smith’s homesickness out on tour, its plea to treasure the present hour cuts deeper than any verse about dragons or battle ever managed. Notice you’re inside your golden stretch while it’s actually happening. Older folks feel that line down in the marrow.

Along comes “Stranger in a Strange Land,” yet another jewel from the same pen, and the backstory beats most fiction. Nothing to do with the Heinlein novel despite the borrowed name, it grew from a story an Arctic explorer told Adrian about a body discovered frozen in the ice, a man who had been dead for decades but remained remarkably preserved. Out of that bleak picture he carved a slow, creeping epic drenched in the record’s cold electronic air. A third offering, “Sea of Madness,” caps a streak that basically crowned him the group’s secret weapon.

Steve carried his share too. “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” pulls its idea from the Alan Sillitoe story and turns into a long, brooding thing about solitude and refusing to bend. “Heaven Can Wait” builds into one of those chants a whole crowd throws its fists up for. “Alexander the Great” runs eight minutes and pretty much walks you through a history lesson, spoken intro and all, a big gamble that lands. Murray gets his turn on “Déjà-Vu,” and the record moves from song to song so smoothly you lose track of how much it fits in.

Give producer Martin Birch a nod as well. He wove these bold new textures together and never once let the riffs vanish under them. Getting the balance right was the whole ballgame. Shove the electronics too far up front and the faithful walk. Hide them and the experiment amounts to nothing. Birch found the sweet spot with such a light touch that somebody hearing this in 2026 might miss how daring it all felt in its moment.

Naturally, the faithful had differing opinions when it dropped. Some cheered the bold stride. Others grumbled that the mighty galloping beast had gone slick and shiny.

The commercial results told their own story. It reached number 3 in Britain, though the bigger reward took longer to land. By 1988 the follow-up arrived, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and it pushed that electronic glow further into a full concept album. Iron Maiden had found another direction to explore without surrendering the musical identity that brought them this far.

Nearly forty years later, the LP still tugs fresh ears toward it, for reasons stretching well past sentiment. Good science fiction ages with grace whenever the craft holding it up stays solid, and these songs were shaped by writers firing on every cylinder they owned. Kids finding it today catch a sound that saw around the corner, hearing hints of where heavy metal would eventually roam. Listen closely and you can hear ideas that would become familiar across later generations of atmospheric and progressive heavy metal. Riggs’s cyberpunk canvas somehow reads more prophetic now than it did under Reagan.

“Wasted Years” gets to anybody who’s ever looked up and asked where a big chunk of life ran off to. “Stranger in a Strange Land” can still put a chill on your neck. Play any of it closely and you’ll dig up small melodies and word choices that slipped right past you the first handful of times.

Nerve is the real story here. A comfy outfit could have knocked out Powerslave part two and pocketed the money without breaking a sweat. These five instead wagered a hard-won name on a gut feeling, the belief that muscle and imagination were never truly at odds. That fight got settled long ago. Somewhere in Time was a jump into the dark, and Iron Maiden nailed the landing so cleanly that the leap keeps heavy metal fans shaking their heads long after.

Staff Writer; Terry Poole

This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…

One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.

Think about what Metallica turned into. Nearly 125 million albums sold worldwide, arenas on five continents, a film crew documenting their group therapy. Then think about where a teenage James Hetfield did his homework. Diamond Head. Four kids out of Stourbridge, England, who dropped “Lightning to the Nations” in 1980 and had already written “Am I Evil?” while most thrash founders were still learning barre chords. Lars Ulrich has admitted, plainly, that his own outfit would not exist without theirs. Yet the machine failed the teachers. Bad management, a botched jump to a bigger label, an ill-timed release called “Canterbury” that chased trends instead of setting them. The material was monstrous. Around it, the business stood like a house of cards.

Here sits the heart of the matter. Commercial success and greatness are not the same measurement, and confusing the two robs you of half the story.

Take King Diamond’s crew, Mercyful Fate. Denmark cooked up this coven. “Melissa” hit in 1983, “Don’t Break the Oath” a year after, and both records still play like a threat somebody actually meant. Hank Shermann and Michael Denner ran twin guitars that sounded lifted off an old horror soundtrack. Then there was King up top, hitting notes so high you half expected the windows to go. Corpse paint on his face years before any Norwegian teenager thought of it. Occult theatre delivered with total conviction. Did any of it go platinum? Not close. But when Metallica assembled a medley stitching five of those songs together, they were paying a debt, not doing a favor. Whole subgenres of extreme music trace their bloodline straight back to that Danish source.

Switzerland handed the world Celtic Frost, and few acts gambled harder for less reward. Tom G. Warrior started out in Hellhammer, which was basically noise and menace, then pushed it into something nobody had a name for. “Morbid Tales” and “To Mega Therion” are where death metal and black metal both got their marching orders, whether those later bands admit it or not. Nobody saw “Into the Pandemonium” coming in 1987. Strings, a woman singing, industrial noise, a Wall of Voodoo cover shoved in for reasons only Tom knew. The critics had no clue what to file it under. Sales stayed modest. History, though, keeps proving that album right. You can hear its ambition echoing through gothic, doom, and avant-garde heaviness decades on.

Doom deserves its own chapter here, because two American outfits practically wrote the manual while the mainstream looked elsewhere.

Chicago birthed Trouble. Black Sabbath lived in their DNA, no hiding it, but Trouble bent the thing sideways with lyrics that actually reached for something while the rest of the scene just wanted to mosh. Wagner didn’t sing so much as bleed. Behind him Rick Wartell and Bruce Franklin stacked riffs heavy enough to warp a floor. Even Rick Rubin bit, signing and producing the 1990 record himself, though it didn’t move the needle any more than the rest. They stayed a musician’s obsession more than a household name, revered by everyone who later dropped the tempo and cranked the fuzz.

Los Angeles gave us Saint Vitus, oddly enough on SST, a label built for hardcore punk. That mismatch tells you plenty. Dave Chandler’s playing sounded like a factory grinding to a halt, ugly and hypnotic. Scott Weinrich, Wino to everybody, took over the mic and they cut “Born Too Late” in 1986, and you could not ask for a title that fit better. The title track is about waking up and realizing you belong to some decade that already ended, which, for a band nobody was buying, hit a little close. Stoner rock, sludge, the entire distorted underground that blew up in the 90s owes these guys a rent check that will never be paid.

Kansas rarely enters this discussion, which is exactly why Manilla Road belongs in it. Wichita, of all places, produced Mark Shelton, a guitarist and storyteller who built cathedrals of epic fantasy out of nothing but ambition and a small budget. “Crystal Logic” from 1983 remains a holy relic among collectors, swords and sorcery and doom knit into songs that felt bigger than the band’s bank account ever allowed. Europe caught on well before America bothered to notice. Shelton just kept going, year after year with barely anyone watching, until he died of a heart attack in Germany in 2018, the morning after playing what became his final show. He went out doing what he had spent his life doing, playing for the faithful who always showed up. Most people never heard the name, and the ones who did will carry it the rest of their lives.

Word of mouth carried these names when nothing else would. Cassette dubs passed hand to hand at shows, fanzines run off on stolen office copiers, older heads schooling younger ones in basements and dusty shops. No algorithm decided any of this. Devotion did the lifting, and devotion has a longer memory than any marketing budget.

Notice the pattern threading through all six. Every band on this list fed something they’d never get to taste. The riffs, the bad attitudes, the stubborn refusal to clean up when the labels wanted radio songs, later acts scooped all of it up and rode it to numbers these guys couldn’t dream of.

So why did the money skip them? Reasons pile up. Timing, for starters, since arriving five years too early is its own kind of curse. Geography hurt, too, because a killer act stranded in Wichita or Copenhagen fought an uphill war against industry gravity centered in a few big cities. Managers fumbled contracts. Labels lost interest. Radio ignored anything that scared the advertisers. And plenty of these musicians simply refused to soften their vision for a paycheck, which is noble and ruinous in equal measure.

Follow that thread and it leads somewhere the sales obsessed folks won’t like. Cash registers often favor what feels familiar, what goes down easy, what a marketing guy can explain in one sentence. Real invention shows up messy and ahead of schedule and impossible to shelve. Scares off the casuals every time. The obsessives, though, they live for exactly that. Time sorts it out eventually. Give a great record twenty years and it stops mattering how many copies left the shelf on release week. What matters is how many players it turned into believers.

Play “Am I Evil?” back to back with the Metallica cover sometime. One version made a fortune. The other made the fortune possible. Both are worth your ears, yet only one carries the weight of having been first, of having imagined the thing before there was any proof it would work.

That is the real ledger. Not units sold but ideas spread, not gold but genealogy. Plenty of these greats died with empty pockets. Slept in vans, ate garbage, then watched somebody else cash the check their ideas wrote. Fair? Not even a little. But right in the end, yeah. Love this stuff long enough, dig under the surface a while, and it hits you that selling big and being great were never once the same thing. The acts who mattered most were often the ones counting the fewest receipts, and the verdict eventually, quietly, sets itself straight.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Read that again. A band famous for chaos is now watching over its own legacy like a jeweler minding a vault.

Elsewhere, Linkin Park is filling stadiums again. Emily Armstrong stepped into an impossible chair, From Zero arrived among the loudest returns in recent memory, and a world tour has circled the planet for two years now, packing arenas and stadiums with people who howl every word back. Nobody treats a lick of it as a passing fad. It plays, instead, like the homecoming of an institution.

Which raises something worth sitting with a minute.

Do the arithmetic. Korn’s debut hit shelves in 1994. Life Is Peachy turns thirty next month, and sure enough it already has the anniversary treatment on colored wax, the kind of fuss labels used to save for Zeppelin IV or Paranoid. Hybrid Theory dropped in 2000. So that kid, the one who scraped together lunch money for those discs, burned copies for half his homeroom, swore up and down he had it all figured out, is pushing 45 today. Mortgage. Cranky knees. A teenager of his own who rolls both eyes when dad turns it up.

And what is that fella doing at this very moment? The same thing the Sabbath faithful did before him. What the Maiden and Zeppelin loyalists did too. He is defending the records of his youth as holy writ, squaring off with anybody who calls them dated, swearing up and down that the young ones simply do not get it.

Here is the truth nobody says out loud about “classic rock.” That tag was never a fixed list. The phrase names a moving window, and the window slides forward roughly a lifetime at a stretch. Chuck Berry and the early Stones held the title once. Later the crown passed to Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Deep Purple. By the 2010s, classic rock radio had begun folding 1990s music into the format, bringing bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam closer to the same oldies cycle their predecessors once entered. The canon is simply whatever a middle aged crowd decides to enshrine. Today that crowd answers to Jonathan Davis and Mike Shinoda.

At some point, with zero ceremony, “nu” quit being an honest prefix. The label turned fossil. Thirty years of dust have gathered on this stuff. Slapping “new” on it today is like carding a graying fortysomething at the door.

Reviewers missed it, naturally. They always do. Critics savaged this whole wave in its prime, sneered at the detuned riffs and the rapping and the raw confessions of damaged teenagers, filed it under noise for mall rats. Funny wrinkle: some of the era’s most influential critics hammered Sabbath in 1970 too, dismissing the band and the sound that would eventually become a foundation stone for heavy music. Time has a way of laundering a reputation, and the platters written off as juvenile racket tend to become, three decades on, the bedrock somebody else builds a career upon.

Study the marketplace and the verdict is already tallied. Deluxe reissues fat with demos. Anniversary vinyl. Tribute shows. Back catalogs surging on streaming because teenagers keep unearthing old records on their phones and passing them around. That is precisely the machinery a culture erects around art it quietly agreed to keep forever.

None of this bloomed in a vacuum, either. Heavy music has forever run like a river with deep, often ignored springs. Start with the sound itself: the distorted riff, the scream, the bottom end that rattles your sternum. Trace all of it upstream and the water turns ancient fast, running clean past the blues and the gospel shout to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who had an electric guitar hollering a good decade before Chuck Berry cut his first sides. Bad Brains? Those cats played faster and meaner than most of the hardcore crowd bowing at their boots. Living Colour, Fishbone, Body Count, and Sevendust kept the current live through the very stretch everybody pretends belonged to other folks. That rubbery seven string groove Fieldy and Munky rode owes plenty to funk and hip hop, not just to Iommi. Anyone actually paying attention clocked that from the jump.

Then comes the part that stings. This past July of 2025, Ozzy Osbourne sat on a black throne at Villa Park, played a farewell show with the founding Sabbath lineup, and was gone 17 days later. The godfather left the building. What that exit signals, past the grief of it, is a changing of the guard. The old deities are walking offstage one by one, and the folks left holding the flame came up on Follow the Leader, Toxicity, and Hybrid Theory. Those faces are the elders now. Wild, yet plain as day.

Roll up to a festival and watch it unfold in real time. Deftones are pulling crowds that would have looked enormous even at their commercial peak. Slipknot tops some of the fattest bills on the planet. Reunion sets vanish from the box office in minutes. Better still: half the pit was not even breathing when these songs first dropped, sporting the shirts regardless, screaming lyrics penned before their birth. That is not nostalgia. Nostalgia demands you were in the room. Inheritance is the sharper word, a very different and far more permanent animal.

Those seeds scattered wider than anybody admitted back then, too. You catch the DNA in a decade of pop punk, in the emo revival, in half the rappers who grew up screaming into webcams, in the easy way heaviness and melody now share a room with no apology owed. The stuff never truly vanished. It merely swapped outfits.

So the Bakersfield veterans are parked in the studio again, sweating each note. Shinoda’s outfit is loading in across continents. And a whole cohort of grown men and women is manning the barricades for the albums that raised them, primed to scrap with anybody who dares call it a phase.

Name it whatever suits you. The prefix always carried an expiration date stamped right on the side. Anything that lasts this long, and draws defenders this fierce, earns itself a fresh word. In rock and roll we hold a special one for the music that outlives the sneers and gets handed down like heirloom silver.

We call it classic.

Staff Writer; Jerry Powell

JP is into heavy metal, rock, blues and just about anything old school… Most days, he would rather talk about a great album than whatever is trending… Hit him up at JPowell@ThyBRHM.com.

They kicked off their first show of 2026 by dusting off six Reign in Blood cuts that had gone unplayed since 2014, 2015 or 2019, then dropped the entire sequence in order, the way it was always meant to hit. It marked the first time Slayer had performed the full album live since 2014. No warmup. Zero mercy. Just the thing itself, start to finish, in roughly the time it takes to microwave a frozen dinner and eat it.

That’s the wild part almost nobody dwells on. Reign in Blood clocks in at just under 29 minutes. Ten cuts, in and out before most modern acts have even finished their intro. Yet if you polled a room full of lifers about the single most important document thrash ever coughed up, this half hour of violence wins going away, no argument, everybody home before dark.

How does something so brief throw such a long shadow? A big chunk of the answer sits behind the mixing board. Rick Rubin, already making noise with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, had never produced a metal LP before, and that outsider ear turned into the secret weapon. So he yanked out nearly all that reverb. Where a lot of that decade buried its guitars in echo chasing something huge, he flipped it and pulled the whole mix tight against your skull. No unnecessary air, no gloss, nothing sitting between you and the riff. Sounds like the amps got dragged into your lap, and I mean that as praise.

Behind the kit sat Dave Lombardo, playing like a man trying to punch straight through the floorboards. His performance on the opener alone rewrote what folks believed two feet and two hands could pull off at that tempo. King and Hanneman didn’t so much trade solos as claw at each other, two guitars snarling and diving like they had a score to settle. Araya up front didn’t oversing a single line. He carried the ugliest lyrics anybody had written with the flat calm of somebody reading you the evening news, and that restraint made them scarier.

Speaking of grim. The opening salvo, Hanneman’s Angel of Death, dragged Josef Mengele and the horrors of Auschwitz into nearly five unblinking minutes, and the controversy started before plenty of listeners ever heard a note. Def Jam’s distributor, Columbia/CBS, refused to handle the record because of Angel of Death and its subject matter. Rick Rubin ultimately found another route through Geffen. Loud voices cried Nazi sympathy, missing the plain truth that describing evil and endorsing it are two very different acts. Controversy did what controversy always does, of course, turning a troubled thrash release into required listening.

Here’s where I plant my flag in the dirt. The reason this beast still lands harder than records three times its size is the exact quality some critics once used to dismiss it. There’s no fat on the bone. None whatsoever. Each of those ten pieces shows up, handles its brutal business, and clears the room. Most run under three. A couple barely crack two. You never hit that soggy midsection where a band obviously ran dry and decided a sprawling doom crawl might fill the gap. Nobody sneaks in a ballad to catch their breath. Slayer never learned how to waste your time. From the first shriek of Angel of Death to the thunderclap that kicks open Raining Blood, the whole ride is one clenched fist.

Stack that against what gets sold as a major statement today. Plenty of newer outfits drop 70 minutes across 14 songs and dare you to survive the whole slog. Technically jaw dropping, no question. Polished within an inch of its life, sure. Somewhere around the ninth track, though, your focus wanders, because not every idea earned its spot and deep down the writer knew it and kept the thing anyway. Bloat wearing ambition as a costume. More is not heavier. It’s just longer.

These four understood a lesson that keeps getting lost in the streaming era, where the temptation to pad a lineup for playlist math is real. A knockout works because it arrives clean and it arrives once. Nobody needs 15 rounds to remember getting dropped. Reign in Blood is the genre’s equivalent of a right hand you never saw coming, and your jaw still throbs at the memory.

The ripple spread everywhere you look. Death metal swiped the tempo and the darkness. Grindcore grabbed the brevity and shoved it to an absurd extreme. Damn near every extreme act since has traced a strand of its DNA back to that furious half hour, which is a strange fate for a heavy metal record barely longer than a sitcom. Rolling Stone eventually parked the LP at number 6 on its rundown of the 100 greatest metal albums ever made. Kerrang! went even further, once naming it the “Heaviest Album Ever Made.” Neither distinction reads like hype once the needle drops.

Which carries us back to right now, and the strange weight of these commemorative Slayer gigs. Hanneman passed in 2013, and Gary Holt shoulders his parts with the reverence of somebody fully aware he’s filling boots that can’t really be filled. Lombardo’s out of the picture too, so Paul Bostaph takes on that impossible drum assignment. Araya and King soldier on, grayer now and four decades removed from the young men who recorded the thing, still conjuring the old fury on command. Something close to sacred hums underneath the sight of aging men honoring a piece of their youth this fiercely, flatly refusing to let time sand it down.

I caught myself choking up a little over clips from these performances, and trust me, that doesn’t happen often. It’s the sound of guys who could coast on the catalog forever choosing instead to prove the case one more time. Play it. All of it. Let the kids in the pit and the veterans in the back settle the whole debate together.

Forty candles, 28 minutes, not a wasted second among them. They carved out something lean and vicious and permanent while a fair share of their peers busied themselves padding twin LPs that history already forgot. That gospel still runs through heavy metal today, and it’s a simple one. Hit the stage, do maximum damage, then clear out before they’re ready for you to go. Nobody has to sit through your filler because there isn’t any. Slayer figured that out four decades ago, and I’ll just say it: no heavy metal act since has left a bigger stain on the floor.

Staff Writer; Terry Poole

This brother brings sharp ears, deep respect, and real passion to every heavy metal riff, rock record, and overlooked gem he covers for TheBRHM… He writes for fans who still believe loud music should have soul, history, and meaning…

One may contact him at TerryP@TheBRHM.com.

Metallica sold the planet. Slayer scared your mother half to death. Megadeth had the man with the vendetta and a fretboard that flat refused to quit. Then, off to the side in skate shorts, grinning like they were in on a joke the rest of us missed, stood the outfit everybody loves to file fourth. Anthrax.

Now, deep into a new century, that same crew is about to hand us Cursum Perficio, arriving September 18, their first full studio effort since 2016. Ten years between studio albums, then this. The timing plays like a dare: keep sleeping if you want.

Let me back up a minute.

The “Big Four” tag was never a ranking of who mattered most. It grew out of the 1980s as shorthand for the four thrash bands that became the era’s biggest commercial forces. Sales mattered enormously, which is why those four names got carved into the tablet. Purists have argued ever since that Overkill or Exodus or Testament earned that fourth seat instead. Fine debate for a barstool. It also misses what actually happened.

Because while three of those groups came up on the West Coast breathing California smog, Scott Ian and company were a New York animal, born in Queens and shaped by the city’s hardcore pulse. You could hear the city in them. That East Coast blood gave the songs a bounce the others never had. And here’s the part the doubters always skip: these guys wrote hooks. Real ones. Joey Belladonna sang, actually sang, soaring clean over the riffs while his rivals barked and snarled. Melody folded inside all that speed made them a strange, singular proposition, and strange rarely gets its due while it’s happening.

Then there’s the stuff that had nothing to do with riffs.

Back in 1987, long before anybody slapped a genre label on the fusion, these New Yorkers dropped “I’m the Man” and welded rap to distorted guitar for laughs and for keeps. By 1991 they’d cut a fresh “Bring the Noise” with Public Enemy, then hauled Chuck D and Flavor Flav out on the road right beside them. Picture that bill for a second. Kids who’d never once cross paths, jammed shoulder to shoulder, hollering the same hook back at the stage. Nobody was writing papers on crossover yet. They just went and did it, loud, and left the room to sort itself out. It made heavy music feel bigger, curious, unafraid of the world outside its own moshpit.

They read, too. “I Am the Law” pulled Judge Dredd straight off the page and into the pit. Stephen King bled through plenty of their work, from the very name of that 1987 landmark set to horror nods buried down in the lyrics. Nerd culture worn as a badge of honor, decades before that became somebody’s marketing plan. When comic shops and record stores finally merged in the public imagination, these five had already been living there for ages.

So why the eternal shrug?

Some of it comes down to bad luck and worse timing. Then grunge showed up and ate everybody’s lunch. Belladonna was out, John Bush of Armored Saint was in, and the sound turned thicker and meaner, less sprint and more grind. Stuff like Stomp 442 held up fine, still does. Trouble was, the crowd that fell hard for that clear high tenor checked out the second a different guy grabbed the mic. The press moved on. Radio moved on. For a long stretch the whole genre got treated like a fossil, and this outfit took the brunt of the neglect even as it kept swinging hard.

What people forget is how many times these players got written off and simply refused to stay buried. Belladonna returned in 2010. Worship Music landed twelve months later and reminded everyone the fire never went out. For All Kings in 2016 proved it wasn’t a fluke. Through all of it, Charlie Benante sat behind the kit as one of the most underappreciated drummers in the history of aggressive music, a true architect of the double bass gallop. Ian’s right hand stayed the metronome of a whole movement, tight enough that folks have called him downpicking’s answer to Angus Young. Frank Bello brought the swagger. This was never a weak link. It was a machine that outlasted its critics.

Which brings us to the strange, perfect poetry of the fresh one.

Cursum Perficio is Latin, and Benante spotted the phrase on a tile at the entrance of Marilyn Monroe’s final home while watching a documentary. It reads, depending on your translator, as “my journey has come to an end” or “I complete my course.” Weighty words for guys who spent four decades being told their journey should have wrapped up long ago. They insist it isn’t a goodbye. Given who we’re talking about, I believe them. Persistence has always been the entire point. Their 1990 release, the one that earned a first Grammy nod, was literally titled for the passage of time. Full circle stuff.

The record got cut at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 with Jay Ruston helping shape the sound, and for once the roster held steady, same five faces as last go-round, no drama, nobody replaced. The early singles back up the noise. “It’s For the Kids” swings with that classic gang vocal snarl. “The Edge of Perfection” and “Everybody’s Got a Plan” show veterans with nothing left to prove and everything to enjoy. There’s a looseness in it, the sound of players who lasted long enough to have fun again.

And that’s the whole argument, really. You want to know who got shortchanged in that famous quartet? It was always the crew dismissed for being too fun, too melodic, too willing to hug a hip hop icon or quote a comic book. The seriousness police docked them points for smiling. Meanwhile they quietly built one of the deepest, most human catalogs in the entire style, and pulled it off while the culture kept declaring them finished.

Time is the cruelest judge any artist ever faces. Reviews fade. Reunion checks clear and get forgotten. Whatever slot you drew on somebody’s ranked list stops mattering the day it prints. All time ever really asks is whether you’re still standing. Forty plus years on, this crew is preparing to answer again on September 18, with a batch of songs that swing like men who’ve got something to prove all over again. The last laugh belongs to the guys in the skate shorts. Turns out the joke was on everybody who counted them out.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Gama Bomb: Wild Zombie-Slaying Thrash

The UK’s Gama Bomb falls into category two but their debut album Survival of the Fastest was an interesting look at what could be in the future. I say “interesting” as I remember there being some fans who had gotten bored with the young thrash bands because there were so many.

Not only were there a lot of them from many places, you could pick up on specific trends in thrash quickly because a good amount of bands would have a similar sound.

For me, this was perfect. I love from this period in part because it’s a young discography for many active bands. Gama Bomb’s Survival of the Fastest came out in 2005 and they’ve released eight albums in total. This isn’t four or five decades of classics and questionable projects to go through.

Survival of the Fastest – Side A

Gama Bomb’s debut also happened to come out when I got into metal but I wouldn’t get into it for another year since I was going through the thrash OGs at the time.

Getting into Survival of the Fastest, we have an 11-track, 29 minute speeder. The sound of the album overall isn’t what you’d get from the motorbastard or blackened thrash end of retro thrash influenced by Sodom, Motorhead and Bathory. This is more of the crossover stuff influenced more like Anthrax and Suicidal Tendencies.

It’s high energy, fast as hell thrash and this album is one for the late 80s and 90s kids or wrong-decade headbangers.

The A-side includes the first six tracks “Zombie Creeping Flesh”, “Steel Teeth (The Metal Jaw)”, “Zombie Command”, “Atomizer”, “Fortified Zone” and “Racists!” I enjoyed all of the A-side to some degree but all tracks except “Racists!” hit hard enough to get that replay after the song or midway through the track.

“Zombie Creeping Flesh” and “Steel Teeth (The Metal Jaw” were the standouts on this side. Don’t sleep on “Zombie Command” and “Atomizer”. They don’t fall short of the two standouts and “Atomizer” is a track that could battle the opener for best two songs on the side.

Standout Tracks: Zombie Creeping Flesh*, Steel Teeth (The Metal Jaw)*, Atomizer

B-Side

The remainder of the album features my two favorite tracks on the album. “Hell Trucker” just rips, it’s exactly my kind of thrash speed-wise and it’s my pick for Song of the Album. The other banger here is “Bullet Belt”. Like “Hell Trucker” and the album as a whole, this is mindless headbanging thrash.

There’s little in the way of social commentary that is going to give you a different perspective on things. If anything it boosts a dislike of racists and Nazis in a fast and fun way but even that’s minor. No, this is for those of us who like zombies, sci-fi, and metal. It’s a formula that Gama Bomb came in with and continue to use today…and it still works!

As for the other three tracks on this side, the B-side opens with “Scientists?” which is a super science/evil science tune that keeps the speed of the album. It’s fine and the same can be said for “Skellington Crew”. Coming in before “Bullet Belt”, it’s actually a good track that also benefits from following “Nuke the Skeets”.

“Nuke the Skeets” is the shortest track on the album and kind of a fun spoken word track at 13 seconds. It’s a fine buffer following “Hell Trucker”.

Strongest Tracks: Hell Trucker**, Bullet Belt*

Strength of the Opener and Closer

“Zombie Creeping Flesh” is a decent enough opening track but there are a few candidates that probably would’ve done better. “Steel Teeth” was a song that had more bite while “Hell Trucker” has more bite than both and would’ve been an incredible opening track.

Also, swapping “ZCF” with either of those songs wouldn’t throw the album off. Many of the songs have a same-y sound to them with a few really popping the ear more than the rest. That’s the kind of party we’ve got going on here.

“Bullet Belt” is perfect where it is as the album closer. I enjoy albums that end on a loud and fast tracks the most and Gama Bomb picked a great closing tune.

Overall, this was a pretty good album. One thing that hurts it is the production of the time. It’s very noticeable if you were to check out Citizen Brain, which was released in 2008 and features all of Survival of the Fastest along with some extras.

Honestly, this album crawled so that Citizen Brain could fly. Check it out!

Staff Writer; James “Metal” Swift Jr.

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.