Last week, yours truly made the annual pilgrimage out to Joliet, home of Molder and the state penitentiary where Jake Blues did hard time, to catch Exodus. Now admittedly, I usually catch shows at the Forge (or as I’ll forever call it, Mojoes) roughly once a month, as a lot of top notch metal and hard rock acts come through what would otherwise be a dead market. However, save for the pandemic years, Exodus has been playing this Chicagoland haunt annually for easily a decade running, largely thanks to their manager just happening to own the venue as well.
While my relationship with Exodus’ catalog can be described as love/hate at best, those who know me personally know that the Exodus albums that I love, I LOVE. No matter how dismal and repetitive their post-Tempo of the Damned output continues to be, Bonded by Blood will forever be the greatest thrash album of all time, and nothing can take that away from them. Raging in the pit to all those classic neck-snapping anthems has had me in the mood for thrash all week, even newer acts who I normally would be too jaded to give a chance. Such is the case for today’s band in review, Faüst, and their sophomore album, Death Galore.
Although this band has existed under various incarnations and monikers going back over a decade, it was in 2020 that they finally found their way as Faüst, and have been tearing it up ever since. Considering this was my first listen of the Czech based thrash outfit, based off the album title and its accompanying crude artwork, I assumed this would be less a full blown thrash outing and more a death/thrash affair. While there are moments scattered about that can be categorized as “death/thrash”, it turns out I was wrong: This IS a full blown thrash outing, one that manages to touch on the savage charm of the genre’s ’80s heyday.
The opening “Terminal Hallucinations” kicks things off in a schizophrenic fashion, channeling the chaotic tech-thrash of Voivod. Ironically, the closing “Conformity Slave” bookends the album in the same unhinged manner, but I digress. As mentioned earlier, at its heaviest, Death Galore goes full blown Possessed style death/thrash, particularly on bloodthirsty bangers like “Where Nightmares Reign Supreme” and “The Cremator”. Yet for the most part, Death Galore sticks to a no frills, old school thrash assault akin to Bonded by Blood, best executed on cuts like the high speed “Exchanging the Suffering”, anarchistic “Entombed Alive”, and relentless “White Torture”. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, yet far more compelling than most bands co-opting the “thrash metal” tag on Bandcamp.
In an age where the lion’s share of late ’00s/early ’10s thrash revivalists have either splintered entirely or come off as a bigger parody of themselves than they were to begin with, Faüst thrash on in youthful defiance, brutalizing anyone who dare remind us this subgenre, a forefather of extreme metal, is now over 40 years old. With a band like Faüst at the helm of today’s thrash scene, there’s no reason we won’t be thrashing and bashing for another 40 years. Death Galore is thrash galore!
7 out of 10
Label: Doomentia Records
Genre: Thrash Metal
For fans of: Exodus, Warbringer, Possessed