Paradox
Heresy

A Saucerful Of Thrash - Episode IV: "Ohhh - Ohhh... I'm a thrasher... I'm a Bay Area thrasher... I'm a Bay Area Thrasher  in Wurzburg" *

Dear metalhead friend, I'm writing to you, so I can distract myself a bit. And since you seem a bit dense, I will write to you more strongly.

You see, metalhead friend, maybe you don't realize how lucky you are. Nowadays, peer to peer gives you the possibility to listen to more or less every musical nonsense that has been published from the invention of the armpit fart until today. Thanks to the "www", you can know everything you want about a record, a band, or a musical genre, simply by tickling the keyboard of the PC that mom and dad gave you for not having failed math. Nowadays, there is debaser.it that loves you and gives you the opportunity to flaunt all your musical knowledge to the four winds and to let dozens of people know and appreciate even the most unknown and forgotten records of your collection.

And instead, what do you do, metalhead friend? You waste all this Odin's bounty, download an album that hasn't been released yet, don't care if it sounds awful or if it's a promotional copy with the Slovakian nurse's voice of your over 50 idol now forced to wear diapers for small leaks, and you review it, contributing to a perverse mechanism where everyone talks about the same records, saying the same things, without realizing that, facing the fifth duplicate, people understandably stop reading and start insulting.

Metalhead friend, curb your reviewing enthusiasm before it leads you to commit the insane act of duplication, make peace with your heart and try to understand once and for all that if you really want to listen to healthy '80s thrash metal, there's only one thing you can do: listen to healthy '80s thrash metal.

"Heresy" is what you need. For many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that, within its genre, it's a little forgotten gem.

It saw the light in 1989, and it's the second full-length album of a quartet from Wurzburg, in Bavaria, led by the talented Charly Steinhauer (guitar and vocals): one of those strange characters that the history of music seems never to be satiated with, who seem to have received talent in exchange for their personal happiness.

"Heresy" is, in some ways, a musical paradox: born from the rough and ungraceful jaws of the Teutonic basin, it reveals itself upon listening as a splendid sample of the Bay Area sound, where the blind guitar rasping, the trademark of much of the '80s German productions, gives way to rhythms evidently borrowed from the American tradition: refined and complex, yet never overly convoluted, often drawing heavily from the most successful creations of Jeff Waters' mind ("Kill Time"). An album where the excesses of hoarseness, a trademark of every faithful disciple of the Triad, are countered by a vocal performance that might not be technically excellent, but is still valid. Instead of the ignorant and insistent satanic lyrics, it even opts for a concept dedicated to the Cathar heresy and the crusade against the Albigensians.

The result is an album where fast-paced tracks, pure concentrations of '80s speed/thrash metal ("Heresy", "Crusaders Revenge"), alternate with heavily pumped mid-up tempos ("Search For Perfection"), and acoustic interludes that, while not miraculous for originality or execution difficulty, enhance the songwriting. An album pervaded by widespread musicality, epic and melodic, sometimes anthemic ("Serenity"), which does not undermine its solidity, its impact force, finding in Metallica's "Master Of Puppets" its barely concealed reference point. "Heresy" ends up being an excellent product, which can only be accused of the delay with which it was released: qualitatively remarkable, it suffers from the derivative nature of its musical proposition, the fact of having nothing to add to what had already been said by those who preceded it, to the point of being (almost) reduced to yet another specimen of a genre that reached full maturity by 1989.

At the time of its release, "Heresy" achieved great success with the public and critics, both at home and abroad and still today represents the pinnacle of Paradox's production. Currently, it's little more than a forgotten album, snubbed even by those who for eighteen years have been aching for their fetish band to return to playing thrash metal. It's an album that "I downloaded, but I still have to listen to really well". An album for which perhaps isn't even worth writing a review...

By the way! ...has anyone already heard the new Metallica?!?

Dedicated to Sòò-Simòònèè, who broke their reins

* Should be sung to the tune of "Englishman In New York"...