Abigail / Fastkill "Far East Necromancers" 7"

Abigail has always been a mixed bag for me, they're blacker than most thrash bands but not as black as most black thrash bands. Did that come out right? On this record they are def on the even less blacker side than they normally are, but that's OK because they really fucking shred it! Boosted by a session guitarist to take care of leads, this record is a bit riffier than typical Abigail, and I think it works really well. The solos are fucking sailing, the main riffs on the two songs kill, and they use leading tones to get back and forth from verse to chorus, which strangely lots of black thrash bands forget about. The second song, "Prophecy of the Evening Star," sounds like they were listening to "2 Minutes to Midnight" right before they wrote it, you'll know what I mean when you hear it. Fastkill, one of my favorite non-black thrash bands, bring more Japanesiness to the table on the record, but sadly with only one original song (the second is an Agent Steel cover). I have to say I don't really like Fastkill's track on this record as much as on their LPs. Actually it's about the same quality as their second LP but much much less technical, it's about as technical as the first LP, but it just doesn't have the same relentless killer punk magic of "Infernal Thrashing Holocaust." Yeah, Abigail really took the lead on this one.

Rotten "Thrash n' Roll" 7"

Mexican thrash punk, what's not to love! I wanted to post a few great non-Black Thrash records before really diving into writing about the 8 million black thrash bands I want to write about. Thrash has become a bit of a confliction for me, given it's really a drinking man's genre and now that drinking has given me cirrhosis (which in turn gave me an extremely rare variation of a somewhat uncommon form of hepatitis) I can no longer be a drinking man. Just pop dope. Does dope work with thrash? Hell yeah, fuck you it works with anything! So when it comes to thrash I've found black thrash to be my niche, but, primarily due to extremely low prices because it's not exactly in style right now, I've accumulated a mass amount of non-black thrash, and this is the difference between the two for me: black thrash is about the violence and the morbidity of violence, while non-black thrash and thrash-punk is about the violence and the fun of the violence. Rotten def bring the fun. The lyrics from the third song on the record sum this band up pretty well: "Killer guitars, killer vomits / Necropounding are blasting the empire of man / Give me another beer, give another lick / Alkoholik Rites, c'mon bitch suck my dick." Awesome. Riffs are super trashy, plenty of slimy melodies and finger twisting, super fast and pissed-off, this would be a great soundtrack for riding your rusty hog across a desert highway at 120 mph. It also feels rarer and rarer to find a non-post-apoc throwback thrash punk band, so that's another plus for the band, but who can deny the fun of the post-apoc bands? This band is all about the elitism and anger towards outiders, but they do it in a pretty funny way (this might be in part because English is clearly not their first language), and their seriousness of it makes it both even more funny and even slimier. A great thrash record needs great energy, killer riffs, and bucketloads of filthy attitude, it's all here.