Flash Terrorist
Body Fusion Limit

The Flash Terrorist could have been the flagship of Italian metal, they could have opened the doors to many valid bands in the realm of alternative and/or more or less extreme metal that proliferated in the 90s (not an easy task, even Extrema didn't succeed despite producing excellent albums).

I don't know much about their history (I was 7 years old when this masterpiece came out), except for the fact that they are a Venetian band formed in 1991 which, after years of hard work, demos, and concerts, managed to release their debut with Nosferatu Records in 1997. I don't know why they broke up, I don't know why an album like "Body Fusion Limit" became merely a cult object.

Why this praise? Because in 1997, for an Italian group to manage to blend the wild impact of "Chaos A.D." and the technological assault of "Demanufacture" before listening to "Body Fusion Limit", I thought it was a joke. Yet, it's precisely the prestigious names of Sepultura and Fear Factory that describe the stylistic coordinates of this album. But it's not a simple "cold fusion" between the two ways of interpreting 90s metal; it’s a brilliant and surgical reinterpretation employed by the Flash Terrorist and their execution and songwriting skills.

"Body Fusion Limit" is equivalent to a chilling journey through a mechanized jungle where the roots of the trees are corroded by rust, where sad natives break their backs, alienated by the System, just like the workers in the great post-industrial cities, where life would repeat every day identically, digitized, in a macabre cybernetic ritual if it weren’t for Flash Terrorist and their industrial death-cyber thrash metal disrupting the plans of the System and the great Programmer.

The first kick in the teeth for the poor virgin listener of this terrible sound is delivered by the pair "Virtual Programmer"/"Body Fusion Limit", the first being a pounding opener, the second a modern title track with riffing that not only makes the early Machine Head envious but also mingles with an orgy of digital music. The entire album is a succession of cartridges with firepower at very high levels, from the physical and psychological attack of "Blood For God", "Victim", and "Infected Molestor" to the dissonant and seismic rhythms of "Scar" and the more martial ones of "Extortion", with "Shothead" and "Lifes To Stake" presenting themselves as groovier and more paced yet equally heavy and convincing.

The best song (difficult to choose which diamond shines more than the others anyway) is "Narcos", characterized by a tribal intro with almost flamenco guitars, evolving into a massacre of relentless groove metal halfway between Sepultura, Ektomorf, and partly Brujeria, complete with gypsy chants and litanies towards the conclusion.

Displaying hallucinating technical qualities (beautiful and hyper-compressed riffing and solos, a rhythm section typically in the Fear Factory style, a vocalist who excels challenging the heavyweights Max Cavalera and Burton C. Bell without using/daring the latter’s clean parts) and moving between thrash incursions, death metal strokes, industrial sampling, and a lot of healthy groove, Flash Terrorist brushed the perfection of the Gods of the 90s, giving one of the most beautiful albums of the last twenty years to the History of Metal.