Sacred Reich
Surf Nicaragua

THE REVIEW

Belonging to what is known as the second wave of American thrash metal, Sacred Reich have always stood out for their music style close to hardcore and for their protest and anti-militarist lyrics, as the group's ironic name already suggests.

In 1988, one year after the release of their debut album "Ignorance," they released an EP, likely as an appetizer for the second album that would come out in 1990, titled "Surf Nicaragua" and containing three new tracks, a cover, and two live songs. The cover, depicting a soldier with a helmet and gas mask ready to throw a grenade while surfing on a coffin, refers to the song that gives the album its name and represents the highlight of the work in question. Indeed, thanks to its rousing chorus, like very few in the history of the genre, and its aggressive yet mocking approach, the song "Wipe Out" by The Surfaris is cited, as well as the drum part of the theme from the 1970s TV series "Hawaii Five-O." It succeeds in conveying the band's pacifist message while inciting headbanging in every respectable thrasher.

The other new tracks ("One Nation" and "Draining You of Life") do not reach the heights of the title track, yet they are still very worthy (especially the first one) and would not have looked out of place on "Ignorance," while the remake of "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath and the live songs prove to be a pleasant entertainment and add substance to the EP, which, being released in the golden years of thrash, gained notoriety without being subsequently overshadowed by "The American Way" two years later; the same cannot be said of the band's last two studio works that came to light in the nineties, when thrash metal was a genre already dead and buried, and Sacred Reich a band of dinosaurs heading towards extinction, trying in vain to survive. They would return to the scene in 2006, amid the thrash revival craze, but that, as they say, is another story.