KILLRAZER “The Burial Begins”
By Dr. Abner Mality
For a simple dose of SLAYER-ized thrash, KILLRAZER from Australia will certainly suffice. These lads from Sydney have tread the boards with some heavy duty company such as SODOM, DISMEMBER, VADER and DESTRUCTION and by osmosis, they’ve picked up a lot of the fire of those venerable bands. While they won’t win any awards for originality (not many do, these days), you can’t say these guys don’t thrash like hell.
After a surprisingly ambitious intro “Stations of the Cross Master”, “Salt In the Wounds” announces that KILLRAZER certainly love their SLAYER. This cut has a good whiff of “Chemical Warfare” to it and you can’t go wrong with that. “Suicide Command” has a choppy, angular feel to it while “The Legions” erupts as one of the most enjoyable thrashers here...a well laid out tune with some screaming lead guitar duelling. Those guitar duels pop up all across the album and are one of its chief delights...both Doug Dalton and Jimmy Lardner-Brown know their way around a fretboard.
The second half of the album delves more into straight heavy metal mixed with groove and thrash elements. “Sunken” is not really a ballad but is more measured while “Seven Years” brings more of a groovy kind of thrash to the game. Dalton’s raw vocals give KILLRAZER a death metal touch. The album’s biggest surprise is a very faithful cover of JUDAS PRIEST’s “Burn In Hell” with none other than “Ripper” Owens himself on vocals. Nice to see a band pay homage to the “Jugulator” album. Things end with the title track, another shredder’s delight that throws a lot of riffs and tempos at the listener.
Pretty meaty stuff from old Oz here. Not really something that’s going to move the needle in the thrash world, but it will not disappoint fans of aggressive music. Let the burial begin…