Power Trip
Manifest Decimation

Nostalgia canaglia. When I return home for the weekend and step back into my room, there’s always a faint smile on my face as I gaze upon everything that surrounded me until I was 19. As the years go by, my little refuge is slowly overflowing with memorabilia. It’s brimming with books and a chaos that's meticulously organized in my mind but remains, quite understandably, incomprehensible to my parents. I guess they’ve gotten used to it. Sometimes, I find myself going through Watchmen by Alan Moore, collecting dust (shame, shame), flipping through that forgotten Dylan Dog comic on top of the shelf, or those yellowed pages of Lovecraft in the tiny library above my bed. I turn my gaze and see the face of Jane Doe gazing inscrutably at me, opening up my favorite corner in my bedroom, the one hidden under a massive Californian flag: the musical one. Hundreds of records and vinyls collected and avidly listened to ever since I began making friends in the early days of high school by talking about the cover of Iron Maiden's Killers with someone who would become one of my lifelong friends. Just yesterday, my eyes fell upon a cover with a radioactive hue, a reissue of Game Over by Nuclear Assault that I stumbled upon in Brussels. And here goes the smile. The urge to put that blend of thrash and hardcore, which during adolescence felt like the epitome of what music could offer, on the stereo is uncontrollable. The only missing piece is to find the Smemoranda with Dan Lilker's photo pasted on the front page, and then the operation "nostalgia canaglia" (as it were) can be said to be complete.

I get to Stranded in Hell and I’ve already started pulling out of the closet the sleeveless denim jackets and Dirty Rotten Imbeciles shirts that have been a bit worn by time, but still manage to make their splendid impression. I missed that thrash dirtied by hardcore punk. How I missed it. Often when I read the news about a new Testament or Overkill album, I listen out of curiosity, but nowadays my attention span for the genre has dwindled. I no longer find the rhythm or the magic that I felt every time I sketched the riff of Rotten to the Core. Oh, speaking of magic. I’ve said a magic word: riff. It may seem exaggerated, but in a genre like crossover thrash, the riff is everything. The riff is God. If you're missing that, you might as well not show up at the starting line. It seems like a beginner flamenco lesson, but the riff combined with rhythm makes records timeless. Maybe it's this forgetfulness of basics, coupled with the plastic taste of recent productions, that has distanced me from the genre. Or maybe, simply, one grows up. Here come Power Trip out of nowhere because yes, at some point this review will have to talk about the Manifest Decimation by these Texans who had the merit of making my eyes sparkle, almost as much as when I first listened to Surf Nicaragua by Sacred Reich. I discovered them with a few years’ delay (three, to be precise) while randomly browsing the lineup of Southern Lord by Greg Anderson and Stephan O'Malley. Mh, a cover with a grind flavor, I thought, in a period devoid of listens, oh well, let's try them: Hallelujah! Open the gates again for the '80s and palm muting.

Eight tracks and everything that needs to be said, is said: riff, riff, riff, riff, riff. Loads of riffs slicing sternly through the air. Cutting, oh, how they cut. Already the weekend was musically pushing in those directions, and Power Trip throw me into an adrenaline trance due to their headbanging because they nail what needs to be nailed. Tight and robust rhythms that grind out that thrash violence in a hardcore mix reminiscent of Cro-Mags in The Age of Quarrel. A deadly combo. The production isn’t rotten or chaotic but powerful and with those typically old school reverbs that made you believe the voice was recorded in a cave with distorted echoes. Here, basically, starts the Paul Baloff and Bonded by Blood (and there it goes) memorial. Power Trip came at the right moment, nothing to be done. From the references I’m making, you’ll understand that our guys won’t make innovation their strong point, but everything runs smoothly, to reconnect with what I was mentioning earlier: rhythm. The performance of our guys is impeccable, there’s nothing that seems artificial. The guitars intertwine and rise in dissonant solos. It’s the classic Jackson Randy Rhoads losing control and becoming lethal among the dizzying stop’n’go and a rhythm section, that of bass and drums, that shatters the dynamics brought into play by Power Trip with lethal impact. The Dallas guys, moreover, aren’t in the mood for that raucous crossover thrash of Municipal Waste. The granite structures are there to prove it, and the lyrics don’t talk about aliens, beers, genetic mutations (oh, I loved those groups, to be clear), but rather they lean on the classic alienating social pessimism.

Just half an hour lying on my bed and with Power Trip resonating with their adrenalin-fueled Manifest Decimation, the nostalgia canaglia prevails. It’s a journey back to when I’d rejoice because Dark Angel had posted on my MySpace board. Or when the Toxic Holocaust concert was as eagerly awaited as the Polish Metal Mind re-releases which made works buried in the oblivion of the '80s like Fear of Tomorrow by Artillery accessible even to a 17-year-old. And about that, I am happy. Yet another example of how music for me is in some small part rational, in a nutshell. And if you too feel the need for a healthy moment of release, maybe Power Trip might help you. Try it to believe it.