Below D.R.I., Suicidal Tendencies and the New York bands sits a rank of groups who made one or two records on labels with no reach and are now traded, reissued and cited by people who were not born when the albums came out.
Excel
From Venice, out of the same intersection of skating, hardcore and local affiliation that produced Suicidal Tendencies, and the best band in this article. Split Image in 1987 is faster, tighter and considerably better written than most of what surrounded it.
The Joke's on You in 1989 is more ambitious and arrived into a market that had stopped paying attention. The band dissolved shortly afterwards. Their guitarist later worked with Suicidal Tendencies, which is the sort of connection this scene is full of.
Attitude Adjustment
From the Bay Area, and the crossover band who sound most like they came out of a thrash scene rather than a hardcore one. American Paranoia in 1986 is a genuinely underrated record and one of the few from this rank that has stayed in print.
Cryptic Slaughter
From Santa Monica, and among the fastest bands anywhere in 1986. Convicted is barely controlled and it is meant to be; the drummer was sixteen and the whole record sounds like it is about to come apart.
They are frequently cited as an ancestor of grindcore and of powerviolence, and the claim holds up: this is what happens when the hardcore side of the trade refuses to slow down at all.
Wehrmacht
From Portland, Oregon, faster still, and completely ridiculous. Shark Attack in 1988 is a novelty record played at a speed that most serious bands could not manage, and it has acquired a devoted following for exactly that combination.
The rest
Ludichrist from New York, whose Immaculate Deception is genuinely strange and genuinely good. Crumbsuckers, also New York, who went from hardcore to thrash across two albums. Leeway, whose Born to Expire is one of the heaviest records the city produced. And Beowulf and No Mercy from Venice.
| Band | From | Record | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cryptic Slaughter | Santa Monica | Convicted | 1986 | Faster than was reasonable |
| Attitude Adjustment | Bay Area | American Paranoia | 1986 | The most thrash of them |
| Excel | Venice | Split Image | 1987 | The best record here |
| Ludichrist | New York | Immaculate Deception | 1986 | Strange and good |
| Leeway | New York | Born to Expire | 1989 | Extremely heavy |
| Wehrmacht | Portland | Shark Attack | 1988 | A novelty, played impossibly fast |
| No Mercy | Venice | Widespread Bloodshed | 1987 | The Suicidal connection |
Why they vanished
The same reasons as everywhere else in this history: labels with no distribution, small pressings, no promotional budget, line up collapses, and a market that turned in 1991 and took the bottom two tiers of every genre with it.
The specific crossover problem was that these bands fell between two industries. The metal labels regarded them as hardcore and the hardcore labels regarded them as metal, so a band could be too heavy for one distributor and too punk for the other, and end up with neither.
Why to bother now
Because the hit rate down here is unusually high. Crossover records are short, cheap to make and hard to overproduce, so the gap in quality between the famous bands and the obscure ones is narrower than in any other corner of this genre.
Split Image is as good as anything D.R.I. made. Convicted is more extreme than most things anybody made in 1986. A listener who works through eight of these records will find three worth keeping, which is a considerably better ratio than the equivalent exercise in technical thrash.
What the same trade produced thirty years later is in Iron Reagan, Enforced, Municipal Waste, and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
How to find this material
Better than it used to be and still uneven. Most of the New York bands have been reissued properly because that scene has a continuous audience. The Californian bands are patchier, and the further from a city a band was, the less likely anybody has licensed it.
The best route in is the compilations. Crossover was a compilation genre in the same way early thrash was, and a good one will put a dozen of these bands in front of you in forty minutes and let you decide which are worth pursuing.
Failing that, follow the personnel. A musician who later appeared in a band you know was in something in 1987, and that something is usually a ninety second song away from being worth an afternoon.
What the second tier tells you about the first
That the famous bands were not exceptional in the way the histories imply.
Excel are as good as D.R.I. Attitude Adjustment are as good as most of what the Bay Area produced. The gap between the names everybody knows and the names nobody does is, in this corner of the genre, almost entirely a matter of who had distribution, who got onto a compilation that sold, and who happened to be in a city with a press.
That is worth knowing because it changes how you listen. A record from this rank is not a lesser version of a famous one; it is the same scene, made by people with the same equipment and the same ideas, who got unlucky.
Where to start
Excel's Split Image, which is the best record on this page and which would be regarded as a classic if it had been released by a band from New York. Then Cryptic Slaughter's Convicted, which is the most extreme, and Attitude Adjustment's American Paranoia, which is the most immediately enjoyable.
Save Wehrmacht for last and treat it as a joke played extremely well, because that is what it is.
One practical warning about the deep end. A fair number of these records were made by bands with one good idea and eleven tracks to fill, and the drop off inside a single album can be steep. The sensible approach is to take the two or three songs everybody names, decide from those whether the band is for you, and only then commit to the record. That is a slightly joyless method and it will save you a great deal of time in a corner of the genre where the standard is genuinely uneven.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Several of these records have complicated reissue histories.
