In the middle of a genre whose sleeves were pentagrams and whose critics were Senate committees, a small number of American bands played the same music, at the same speed, with the same aggression, and meant the opposite thing by it.
Christian thrash is the most awkward corner of this history and one of the most interesting, partly because several of the records are genuinely good and partly because the bands had a harder time than anybody.
Believer
From Pennsylvania, and the best band in this category by a distance. Sanity Obscure in 1990 is technical thrash with genuine compositional ambition, including a track with a string arrangement and an operatic soprano, which in 1990 was not something anybody in this genre was attempting.
Judged purely on the music it belongs alongside the technical records of the period, and it has been quietly rediscovered over the last decade by people who had no idea it existed.
Tourniquet
Los Angeles, with a drummer in Ted Kirkpatrick who could play anything and a taste for surgical and medical imagery that gave them a visual identity nobody else had. Technically the most accomplished band in this corner.
Vengeance Rising
The most extreme of them, and the strangest story. Human Sacrifice in 1988 is genuinely brutal, closer to death metal than to thrash in places, and the band's singer later renounced the faith entirely and spent years attacking it, which is not a career arc anybody predicted.
Deliverance
Californian, and the most conventionally thrash of the group: fast, tight and closest in sound to the mainstream of the genre. Later albums moved towards industrial and progressive material and lost most of the audience.
| Band | From | Start with | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vengeance Rising | California | Human Sacrifice | 1988 | The extreme end |
| Deliverance | California | Deliverance | 1989 | The most conventional |
| Believer | Pennsylvania | Sanity Obscure | 1990 | The most ambitious |
| Tourniquet | Los Angeles | Psycho Surgery | 1991 | The most technical |
The double bind
These bands had a harder time than anybody in this genre and the reason is structural rather than musical.
The metal audience largely would not take them seriously, on the grounds that the whole aesthetic was built in opposition to exactly what they were preaching. The lyrics were not simply unfashionable; for a substantial part of the audience they inverted the point of the music.
And the churches that might have supported them mostly regarded the music itself as the problem. A pastor who has read a pamphlet about backmasking is not going to be persuaded by the fact that the lyrics are scriptural. Several of these bands were refused venues by both sides in the same month.
What they got instead was a small dedicated network of Christian metal labels, festivals and distributors, which kept them alive and also sealed them off from the audience most likely to appreciate the records.
How to judge the music
On the same criteria as everything else, which is the only defensible position and also the least common one.
Riff economy, legibility, a rhythm section writing rather than keeping time, and something behind the noise worth saying. Believer and Tourniquet score well on all four. Vengeance Rising scores on three and on sheer conviction. Deliverance are competent and unremarkable.
The objection that the lyrics are proselytising is fair enough as a personal preference and it is not a musical judgement, and it is worth noticing that the same listener frequently has no difficulty with an album about Satan written by three men from Newcastle who did not believe a word of it. Sincerity in either direction is a strange thing to hold against a record.
What happened to them
Roughly what happened to everybody. The scene contracted after 1992, the Christian metal label infrastructure shrank with it, and most of these bands stopped or changed direction. Believer reformed in the 2000s and made two more records. Tourniquet have continued in various forms. Vengeance Rising ended in acrimony and theology.
What has changed since is the reception. A generation with no investment in the culture war of 1990 has found Sanity Obscure and Psycho Surgery through streaming and reissues and taken them on their merits, which is roughly what the bands asked for at the time and did not get.
The vocalists across the whole genre, including this corner, are surveyed in Thrash Metal Singers, and the full map is in the bands you need to know.
The wider network
Behind the four bands above sat a small parallel industry that almost nobody outside it knew existed, and it is worth describing because it explains how the records got made at all.
There were dedicated labels, of which R.E.X. and Intense were the most significant. There were festivals, most notably Cornerstone in Illinois, which ran for decades and gave these bands the audience that clubs would not. There were distributors selling by mail order through church networks and specialist shops, and a press of fanzines and magazines covering the scene in complete isolation from Kerrang! and its equivalents.
It functioned, in other words, exactly like the secular metal underground of the same period, with the same economics and the same reliance on the post, and with an even smaller audience.
The bands next door
The category extends beyond thrash and a few names belong in any survey of it.
Stryper are the famous case and are not thrash at all; they are a glam metal band with a chart hit and yellow and black stripes. Mortification in Australia went straight into death metal. Living Sacrifice began as thrash and turned into one of the better metalcore bands of the 1990s. Bloodgood, Barren Cross and Sacred Warrior filled the space between traditional metal and this.
What that spread shows is that the Christian metal scene was not a genre, it was a distribution network, and it carried whatever its bands happened to be playing. The thrash wing of it was the most musically serious part and the least commercially successful, which will surprise nobody who has read the rest of this history.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Statements about the bands' reception follow contemporary accounts and the musicians' published recollections.
