I have to be honest and say a lot of what Anthrax did over the years really lost me. This is their next EP after their first album and armed with (the then) new singer Joey Belladonna they were intent on making some waves. I much prefer the sounds of traditional metal vs some of their later stuff (especially with Bush on vocals) This for me is the classic heavy metal heaven!
Original singer, Neil Turbin had some great pipes and was always going to be hard to replace. I liked their first album a lot, but holy crap, Joey Belladonna had some amazing pipes on him and soared majestically above the music which had I would put as an extension of what Judas Priest were doing at the time. To be fair to the band it wasn’t just a Priest rip-off either, as a band they had some breakneck riffage faster than pretty much anything that had come out before this point (except for maybe Metallica’s Kill Em All). What I mean by this is they basically took the metal sounds of Priest and took it a huge step further. I’d even go so far as to say Belladonna might have been a better singer than Halford. Either way he’s probably the only singer I could think of that could have replaced Turbin and done a convincing job.
The songs are so good I have to now ask myself why did Anthrax choose to go in the direction they did? Both Turbin and later on Belladonna are very capable singers and I can’t help but feel the band really could have kicked ass in either direction they went in. There was certainly a market for this stuff at the time. Maybe they saw what Metallica were doing and decided to follow on in that direction? To be honest I can’t blame them for that either. They did capitalise on the rise of thrash metal rather well.
But either way if you like high octane traditional style Heavy Metal, this is one EP you have to check out. No tracks on this one can be considered as filler. I especially love “Metal Thrashing Mad” but seriously they’re all great. Superb riffage, excellent lead guitars (not one note out of place) and dammit Belladonna’s vocals are untouchable on this this.
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