Ask what the Bay Area thrash sound is and you are usually handed weather instead of music: fog, warehouses, cheap rent, a low ceiling in Berkeley. None of that tells you what to listen for. The sound is a set of decisions, taken and then hardened into law: how a riff is built, how two guitars divide the labour between them, where the snare lands, how high the shouting sits, how dry the room is allowed to be. A dozen bands rehearsing within an hour of one another settled those decisions between 1983 and 1988, and what came out was a house style the rest of the world either copied wholesale or refused on principle.
This is the technical companion to this part of the history. That piece follows the people. This one takes the records apart with a screwdriver, using Germany and the East Coast as controls throughout, because the fastest way to hear what the East Bay chose is to hear what the other two chose instead.
The riff is the subject of the song
Start with the right hand, because everything else follows from it. Bay Area rhythm guitar is downpicked: every note struck on the downstroke, at tempos where alternate picking would be easier and would sound wrong. The downstroke gives each note the same attack and the same fractional silence in front of it, so a run of eighth notes arrives as a row of separate blows rather than a smear. Add palm muting, the heel of the hand parked on the strings just ahead of the bridge, and you get the chug: pitched, percussive, milled tight enough for a drummer to bolt himself to. James Hetfield and Gary Holt hold that for four and five minutes at a stretch without once letting the wrist relax into a shuffle, which is not a stylistic preference. It is manual labour, performed to a tolerance.
The material on top is mostly chromatic. A Bay Area riff sits on a low open string and walks upward by half steps, or hammers a pedal note while a second voice climbs a semitone at a time above it. Very little blues in any of it, almost no pentatonic swagger. That chromatic walk is the clearest fingerprint the style has, and it does something structural rather than decorative: because the riff is not a chord progression, the song cannot be about its chorus. The riff is the subject. Bands wrote five and six distinct riffs per song and arranged them like paragraphs, each earning its place and then handing over to the next.
Exodus cut Bonded By Blood in July 1984 at Prairie Sun in Cotati, with John Volaitis engineering and Mark Whitaker producing, and Torrid put it out on 5 April 1985 after most of a year on a shelf. The title track and A Lesson In Violence carry the method in its purest state: riffs short, chromatic, repeated exactly, stacked without transitions to smooth the joins. Nothing modulates. The song ends because the last riff has finished saying what it came to say.
Two guitars that agree
Almost every band in the scene ran two guitarists under a strict division of labour. One holds the downpicked rhythm without pause, the other leaves it for the lead and returns for the harmony. Holt and Rick Hunolt in Exodus were the model. Testament refined it with Eric Peterson on rhythm and Alex Skolnick, a schooled player who could phrase over the top rather than merely run fast. Death Angel, Vio-lence, Forbidden and Heathen all used the same split.
The harmonised lead came out of the British bands, mostly Thin Lizzy by way of Iron Maiden, and the Bay Area kept it at exactly the moment Germany threw it away. Two guitars moving in thirds over a fast rhythm is a melodic gesture, and it is the reason a Bay Area record can carry five minutes of instrumental without losing the room. Metallica made the case on Ride The Lightning in 1984 and everybody local heard the argument being made. Kreator and Sodom in the same years went the other way, into leads that dive, scrape and stop, two voices rarely moving together, because the object over there was pressure rather than melody. Slayer, up from Los Angeles, harmonised less than anybody.
Two guitars in thirds over a fast rhythm is a melodic gesture, and it is why a Bay Area record can carry five minutes of instrumental without losing the room.
The Legacy is the record for the arrangement rather than for the aggression. It was cut in January 1987 at Pyramid Sound in Ithaca, New York, with Alex Perialas producing, and Megaforce released it on 21 April 1987, which is itself a fact worth holding: the Bay Area house sound was frequently captured three thousand miles from the Bay. Over The Wall opens on a clean figure, drops into a chromatic run, and by the middle Skolnick is playing lines a jazz teacher would sign off on, over a rhythm part that has not eased for a single bar.
The beat underneath and the bark on top
The engine is the skank beat, lifted whole from hardcore punk: kick on the downbeat, snare on the upbeat, hi-hat keeping eighths, driven until the snare is landing several times a second. Simple to write and exhausting to play, which is why it sounds like effort even at low volume.
The detail that separates these drummers from everyone who came after is what they did with the double kick. They used it as punctuation, a burst of six or eight notes to shove a section forward or fill a bar under a riff change, and then they got off it. It is not the continuous carpet death metal laid down later, and it is not the near constant roll Slayer took out of Dave Lombardo. Tom Hunting in Exodus is the reference point: fast, loose in the shoulders, and stingy with the second pedal.
The voice is barked rather than sung, pitched noticeably higher than the German bands, and phrased rhythmically so that it doubles the riff instead of floating above it. Paul Baloff, Steve Souza, Chuck Billy and Sean Killian all sit up in the throat with the hard consonants out front. The Germans went the other way entirely, down into a lower and dirtier rasp. On the East Coast, Overkill's Bobby Blitz shrieked higher still and Anthrax hired an actual melodic singer in Joey Belladonna, which is why Anthrax records bounce where these ones grind.
The bass got room here too, and that was not the norm anywhere else. Cliff Burton's writing on Ride The Lightning made it ordinary for a thrash bassist to be audible and to be handed a passage of his own, and local engineers mixed to suit. That audibility is also why the pit and the stage diving could be timed to a record rather than merely to a tempo, which is the subject of Stage Diving and the Pit.
Structures and studios
The songs are long by the standards of 1985, commonly five to seven minutes, and they move. The usual shape opens clean or at mid tempo, drops into the fast section, breaks down to a half time riff around two thirds through, then either climbs back out or ends on the slow part. The tempo shifts are written in rather than improvised, and the whole band has to turn on a single beat. That is where the local obsession with rehearsal comes from, and why tightness was treated in the East Bay as a moral quality rather than a technical one.
The production follows from the writing. The records that matter are dry, close miked and separated: each guitar on its own side, the snare forward with almost no reverb on it, the low end held under control rather than left woolly. Prairie Sun in Cotati handled Exodus and Possessed, whose Seven Churches was cut there in a single week of spring 1985 with Randy Burns producing and reached the shops on Combat that 4 November. Metallica went to Sweet Silence in Copenhagen and came back with Flemming Rasmussen's deeper version of the same clarity. Others were shipped east to Pyramid Sound.
The German records of the same years are murkier, and murkier on purpose. Kreator cut Pleasure To Kill at Musiclab in Berlin in 1986 with Harris Johns for Noise, and what comes back off the tape is more room, less separation, a wall rather than a diagram. Neither approach is better than the other. They answer different questions about whether a listener is supposed to be able to take a riff apart while it is still playing.
What to listen for on a first pass
| Marker | Hear it on | Where to point your ear |
|---|---|---|
| Chromatic riff walking by half steps | Exodus, Bonded By Blood (1985) | A Lesson In Violence, first thirty seconds |
| Palm muted downpicking held at tempo | Metallica, Master Of Puppets (1986) | Battery, the whole rhythm track |
| Harmonised twin lead | Testament, The Legacy (1987) | Over The Wall, the solo section |
| Skank beat, double kick as punctuation | Vio-lence, Eternal Nightmare (1988) | Title track, the fills between riffs |
| Bass written rather than followed | Metallica, Ride The Lightning (1984) | For Whom The Bell Tolls, the opening |
Why it stopped working
The style dated fast, and that is the honest ending. By 1990 the precision that had made these records had hardened into a straitjacket: the same downstroke, the same chromatic walk, the same turn on the same beat, executed by bands who had learned the rules without having had to invent them. The ones who survived either slowed down or carried the technique somewhere the scene had never planned for.
But for six or seven years a group of musicians living within an hour of each other agreed, without ever writing it down, on what a riff was actually for. You can hear the whole agreement inside the first bar.
