Getting My Thrash Back On

Sounds Good!

This week, along with the usual movies and TV and listening to movie soundtracks, jazz and ambient, I have been hearing a lot of Thrash. I don’t usually listen to a lot of Thrash. Not since I was about 15 or 16. But, ever since then, it has been a component of my listening. I have my favourites.

Metallica’s Ride The Lightning, Slayer’s Reign In Blood, the first few Megadeth albums…early Anthrax, the “Big Four” as they’re known.

I’m not – overly – a metal guy. But I’m also not not a metal guy. And it was a bloody good time getting the lead out this week. I’m not even sure how it happened, but I thought I’d work through the Metallica catalogue from the start – and found Kill ‘Em All far more thrilling than I had last remembered. After that I just started dabbling back in some very old news. Sepultura’s Roots was so very good. Better than I had ever known it (and I didn’t actually know it super well).

The roots of heavy metal are in things like Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, obviously Black Sabbath in particular and then you can go to slightly lesser-known things like Blue Cheer and even the Johnny Burnette Rock’n’Roll Trio. These are all things I love very much. I still dig AC/DC. I’m never too far from a lot of hard rock – but metal isn’t a staple part of the musical diet most weeks.

This week it was. And it was wonderful.

The best thing about it – being a nerd that lists a lot of what I listen to on social media (album cover pics on my Instagram as I’m going, names of albums and artists on the Twitter as I remember, and a whole Facebook page basically devoted to music) – was the encouragement I got from only-slightly baffled onlookers.

Metal is a community. A very accepting community. And old-school Thrash fans came out to play, sharing the first Metallica album they bought, to tell me to check out things like Kreator and to remember Testament too, not just “the big four”; to listen to Exodus, and not just because Kirk was snaffled up by Metallica but because Bonded By Blood was and still is a Bay Area Thrash Metal Classic!

Geez, it was good though, having this help. No sarcasm. I checked out not only Roots but also Arise by Sepultura. Because several people told me it was their best. (And they probably aren’t wrong).

Someone hoped I wasn’t on a Thrash metal listening jag out of irony. And I said that I never do anything ironically. At least, I don’t think so, eh…

Someone else said they’d been a huge Thrash fan in their teens but couldn’t quite imagine a week of the listening I had had. Even back then.

Others probably still considered the effort lightweight.

But it was wonderful to have such encouragement. Such knowledge. It reminds you of the power of community. And more than that, it’s good to have hints and reminders of the ‘good side’ of social media. Ten years ago, it felt like such a fun tribe. These days, not always so much.

The other thing that was interesting to me this week was how easy it was to listen to a lot of this stuff – some for the first time, some for the first time in years…

Easy, in that it didn’t feel all that heavy. It just (mostly) felt (and sounded) good.

Way back, in the very early 1990s, as a devotee of Guitar World magazine, I remember an interview with Jeff Beck where he said that all music could be heavy, not just metal. And he added that he’d heard jazz played heavier than the heaviest of metals.

I loved that.

Because as a young jazz fan I often thought of this mind-blowing music as so heavy in the way it burrowed to the soul. And some of my friends caught up only in rock and metal thought that jazz was just a maths problem, or some tight musical knitting. It was only nerdy and uncool. It was dated and/or they just didn’t have the facility for it.

Listening from jazz to the far tougher and wilder free jazz variant, and from there to a lot of experimental/noise music (which is often linked to metal in some way) I found a lot of the 80s and early 90s Thrash (the era/s I love and remember fondly) quite lightweight if anything. Certainly very accessible. More than it had ever been.

I also found it very focussing when working.

I’m picking my mate up for the movies with Megadeth’s Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying? absolutely blasting from my distorted, busted car speakers. It might as well be George Benson. I’m in the home office working with Anvil’s Metal on Metal rolling out like it’s Loaded by The Velvet Underground (well, not quite), or walking through town with Anthrax’s debut in my ears, sounding like, well, like Anthrax’s debut…because that record doesn’t even really sound like anything else the band went on to do and become. But you get the point, maybe?

And to celebrate that point, I made a playlist of some of my Thrash favourites from this week.

Now this won’t be for everyone that’s reading, but give it a hoon if you’re willing. And remember this isn’t all of my favourite stuff, just some bits from this week’s listening. A wee sampler of my mind this week, a tiny insight. And a lot of fun. I think it works.

Speaking of wee samplers, for non-Thrash fans, you won’t find any metal at all on the usual weekly playlist, volume 47 of A Little Something For The Weekend.

But any Thrash fans out there? Please give me some more must-listen albums, specifically from the 1980s and very early 90s. That’s my timeframe. That’s what I’m interested in. I’d love to know (very seriously, not ironically at all) what else I need to hear please.