Forbidden
Forbidden Evil

Children of a Lesser God? In the series: "the second wave hurts more than the first".

It's sad to note how, in recent years, young enthusiasts of extreme music hold a superficial knowledge of the Thrash Metal movement. Whether due to an actual crisis in the genre (which has lasted for ages) or due to poor distribution of the old records, only a few of these young people, truth be told, know the value of the "minor" bands belonging to the "second era of Thrash", chronologically placed in the second half of the '80s. Bands like Flotsam & Jetsam, Annihilator, Dark Angel, and Death Angel thus find themselves inexplicably relegated to the back rows of fame, condemned to lie in the shadow of more famous names, becoming modern-day Cincinnati of celebrity, destined never to grasp success, even though they are in the right pot to cook their Thrash notes.

Precisely in that limbo of popularity and oblivion, we find the name Forbidden, known to many as "the group where Paul Bostaph (future Slayer drummer) and Robb Flynn played", entering a scene - that of the Thrash Bay Area -, when it was heading to the twilight of its Gods, yet capable of producing masterpieces of extraordinary caliber, a perfect blend of "reasoned anger" and personality.
The band emitted its first cries in 1985 under the name Forbidden Evil, but after the departure of Robb Flynn (guitarist and founding member, later of Machine Head) to join Vio-Lence, they shortened the name to Forbidden to debut and align eight gems of strong, calculated, direct, and inspired Thrash Metal (produced by the Cuniberti/Caldwell team).

"Forbidden Evil", released in 1988, is one of the most devastating debuts of '80s Thrash for its ferocity, technical skill, and personality, a perfect combination of the most violent Thrash and what, until a few records before, could well be considered its antitheses: the renunciation of hyper-speed, the complexity of songwriting, and openness to melodic concessions. It's as if that legendary "Lesson In Violence" from the genre's founding fathers had found new vigor, another form, perhaps more refined, certainly just as aggressive.

The opener "Chalice Of Blood" ends up being a bit of the symbolic piece of the platter: never frantic, yet the head nods with Bostaph keeping pace and allowing the piece to take off, a punch so simple, yet so difficult to execute for that reason. Because Forbidden's is a hard and compact sonic wall, but to hit the listener, it employs a new register, made of brainy and nervous rhythms, however never losing sight of its own effectiveness, the immediacy of listening. A sonic violence forced into contorted and tight musical architectures and which, precisely because of this, hurts even more: a guitar delirium tremens amid murderous grating ("March Into Fire"), lace-like solos ("Through Eyes Of Glass"), and an epic beginning ("Forbidden Evil") that reshapes into a compressed sound, ideal for engraving in our imagination the album cover, an enticing struggle between good and evil, which however both appear wicked (and the redhead even gets the worst of it, almost a pyramid with a well-hidden eye?).

The frenetic intertwining of Locicero and Alvelais's guitars (later in Testament), Bostaph's swirling pedals, Camacho's tachycardic bass seem to converge and explode in Russ Anderson's voice: endowed with a unique timbre and versatility, capable of scraping the most feral lurking in his vocal cords and then unleashing it in a continuous - and casual - veer of hoarse growls and high-pitched screams, powerful falsettos and angry shouts, disturbing whispers ("Feel No Pain") and cries imbued with a sort of sick epicness.

"Forbidden Evil" represents the perfect and inevitable maturation of Bay Area-made Thrash. It reworks, without overturning, all the musical and ideological rules of the movement, introducing for the first time what can be called "cold passion" or "reasoned intuition". All the unruliness and instinctive intuition present in the early Thrash works is harnessed with chains of reasoning and unleashed with refined precision: explosions of limitless anger give way to premeditated surgical violence.

The passionate murderer finally evolves and becomes a ruthless killer.

Thrash Metal thus succeeds in organizing its restless stylistic chaos, imposing control over the aggression that lies at the base of the movement, all without abandoning its genetic wickedness and without allowing too much space to the melodic methodicalness that characterized the "Metallic Puppeteer".

Forbidden, it must be said, will end up representing somewhat the apex and decline of the entire Bay Area scene: deserving credit for invigorating the genre with ideas and inspiration just as it was running out of things to say, they would inadvertently highlight its structural and stylistic limits. Only two years later, with the excellent "Twisted Into Form", (thanks also to a more refined production and the entry of Tim Calvert), the group would manage to push even further, ultimately breaking down the genre's prefab barriers. Locicero and company thus lay the groundwork for the change that will characterize the band's sound in the next decade: the inauguration of the further technical concept, an inevitable landing tied to the Post-Thrash shores of "Distortion" (close to the Machine Head sound) and "Green", in which Anderson's vocals find themselves mortified and compressed into modern, yet decidedly soulless, sounds.