Bonded By Blood
Feed The Beast

THE REVIEW

Welcome to the free plagiarism fair!

The band's name alone should already hint at the musical genre they offer: old school thrash metal, the kind from the eighties, speedy, rough, fierce, with intricate solos and a singer who doesn't sound like a demon chained in the lungs of the underworld.

"Immortal Life" opens as we would always hope: chainsaw guitars filled with lightning-fast solos, with the singer mimicking the various frontmen who influenced him, primarily Araya, Steve "Zetro" Souza, and company. "Feed The Beast" is everything any metalhead clinging to nostalgia wanted and couldn't have because of the continuous innovation of the bands that today focus on thrash metal.

In fact, the BBB don't care about experimentation, and it doesn't matter if in "Self Immolation" they imitate Slayer from "Seasons In The Abyss", in "The Evil Within" Death Angel, and in "Necropsy" and "Tormenting Voices" the Anthrax of the golden times.

Summing up, this is an album that, despite enjoying a perfect production, despite enjoying an always over-the-top lineup, with guitarists and the entire rhythm section that you'd have to shoot at their arms and legs to stop them, despite being the quintessential eighties thrash album (which I love, managing to blend Slayer, Overkill, Anthrax, Metallica, Exodus, Testament, and Megadeth) suffers from the flaw that... alas, it is devoid, indeed, of any desire to dare.

But it's clear from the start that the guys in the band play purely for fun, not caring about who or what to be accountable to, pursuing only what they love to do most, paying tribute to the bands they have loved the most, without even trying the slightest bit to emerge from their own anonymity.

However, you can't reward with full marks something that tastes of the aged and of what's already been done and overdone, hence the maximum is precluded a priori, because I would prefer to reward works that are slightly imperfect, perhaps not overly sweet and entirely polished, but certainly more personal and definitely much more daring.