In June 1988 the American monthly Circus gave a short review to a debut on Roadracer, and Paul Gallotta, reviewing it, heard in it something close to Metallica fronted by an anonymous, high-pitched vocalist, which he meant as a reservation and which remains, read today, as exact a definition of power thrash as any printed by a man who was not trying to write one.
Released in December 1987 with Tom Morris producing, written almost entirely by Josh Christian, who shared only two of its ten songs with the man at the microphone, and played at a speed that put it on the same shelves as every fast American record of the year, the Peekskill quartet that had started out under the name Tokyo was Toxik, and World Circus kicked the thrash bark off the riser and stood a tenor in the space it left. The reviewer heard a flaw. It was a blueprint.
Power thrash: a thrash right hand under a singer
Strip the label back to its working parts and power thrash is a division of labour inside one band. The guitars do what thrash guitars do, a palm muted attack at speed, the riff built to drive rather than to ring, while the voice above them does what a heavy metal singer in the line of Judas Priest does, holding long notes, climbing above the stave and carrying a tune a room could follow. Thrash supplies the right hand. The branch lives in what was put on top of it, and it takes its line among the dozen branches in the survey that covers it for exactly that reason.
The trouble is that the two jobs pull against each other, and an instrument from far outside metal shows how a musician lives with that. On the top of a flamenco guitar, beside the soundhole, the maker glues a thin plate called the golpeador, because the ring finger of the playing hand strikes the wood on the accents of the compás, the rhythmic cycle every song is counted in, and a season of nights without that plate would batter the top of the guitar to ruin; the plate is the part that is replaced when the wear shows, and through all of it the cantaor sings over the guitar in a line the striking hand never touches and could not mark if it tried. The instrument is armoured against its own rhythm hand so that the voice above it survives. That is the bargain of power thrash, and it holds only as long as the armour does.
Many of the American bands that made the bargain did so in the same three years and on the same handful of labels. Metal Blade released Flotsam and Jetsam's Doomsday for the Deceiver on 4 July 1986, produced by Brian Slagel and the band, with Eric A.K. Knutson singing over a thrash record in a register most thrash singers never visited; Combat and Roadrunner took others. When Megadeth's Dave Mustaine sat in the producer's chair for Sanctuary's Refuge Denied on Epic in 1988, the crossing had a thrash star's signature on it.
Tom Morris, Tampa and two singers who left
Ten songs in under forty minutes, eight of them between two and four minutes long, the record that critic was describing is World Circus, cut with Tom Morris at the desk and now filed as an early example of technical thrash. Mike Sanders sang it. He was gone by 1989.
"Heart Attack", the opening track at three minutes and forty-seven seconds, is the case in miniature. Christian's riffing does the thrash work and Sanders wails across it in a high falsetto, and the polarised reception of his voice, admired by some listeners and pushed past their limit by others, is the reception the whole branch would get for the next decade. Opinion split on the singer far more than on the guitarist.
Three years later the same producer was working the same seam for a different band. Recorded at Morrisound in Tampa with Tom Morris producing and released by Century Media in November 1990 in Europe and in 1991 in North America, the Florida debut that put Gene Adam at the microphone over riffs that take Iron Maiden's gallop and push it toward thrash was Iced Earth's first album, and Adam never sang on another one.
Adam was the first of three singers in three albums.
The Bay Area bands that kept a tenor
The thrash heartland had its own exponents of the bargain, and they were not obscure in their own day.
Released by Combat on 1 May 1987, produced by Ronnie Montrose, a guitarist from the hard rock of the seventies, and built on the twin guitars of Lee Altus and Doug Piercy, the Bay Area quintet that put Dave White at the front of seven-minute thrash songs such as "Open the Grave" and "World's End" was Heathen, and Breaking the Silence is reported to have sold close to a hundred thousand copies worldwide in 1987.
The single says more than the sales. "Set Me Free" is a song by Sweet, the British glam band, from 1974, and Heathen tore it off its glitter, ran it through two thrash guitars and handed the vocal to White, so that a song written to be sung by a pop crowd came out of a thrash band as the single that carried the record. Its video went into rotation on Headbangers Ball, the weekly metal programme on MTV, which is as close to daytime as the branch got in the eighties. A thrash band that covers a glam single, and takes it onto television, has already told you which half of power thrash it means.
Across the bay, Forbidden put out Forbidden Evil on Combat and Relativity on 30 September 1988 with Russ Anderson singing, on the label that had released Heathen a year and a half earlier. Two Bay Area thrash debuts, one label, two singers who sang.
In power thrash the riff is the band and the voice is the vacancy.
The voice is the part that gets replaced
Read the credits of the branch in order and a pattern rises off the page that no sleeve note admits. The riff writer stays. The singer goes.
| Band | Record | Year | Singer | Next record's singer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toxik | World Circus | 1987 | Mike Sanders | Charlie Sabin, Think This (1989) |
| Metal Church | The Dark | 1986 | David Wayne | Mike Howe, Blessing in Disguise (1989) |
| Iced Earth | Iced Earth | 1990 | Gene Adam | John Greely, Night of the Stormrider (1991) |
| Iced Earth | Night of the Stormrider | 1991 | John Greely | Matt Barlow, Burnt Offerings (1995) |
Toxik swapped Sanders for Charlie Sabin and made Think This for Roadracer in 1989. Metal Church replaced David Wayne with Mike Howe and, with Terry Date producing, released Blessing in Disguise on Elektra on 7 February 1989, a record that reached 75 on the Billboard 200 and 39 in Germany while it sawed the speed off the first two albums and stretched what was left toward something longer and more progressive, "Anthem to the Estranged" alone running nine and a half minutes. The new voice and the new direction arrived together. They usually do.
Think of a tenor pan, the lead drum of a steel band, sunk by hammer from the bottom of an oil drum and grooved into note panels, the highest notes beaten smallest, where every hard night of sticks drags the pan off its tuning, so that a tuner's hammer comes back to it once or twice a year whatever the bass drums standing behind it are doing. A thrash band treats its high voice the same way. The low end is the instrument. The top is maintenance.
"Stormrider", four minutes and forty-seven seconds in the middle of a concept album about a man who turns from religion and helps destroy the world, is the branch caught in the act: the man who wrote the riffs walking up to the microphone because the riffs mattered more than whoever sang them. On any honest reading of those three records, Iced Earth was one guitarist's right hand looking for a throat.
Who stayed in the crossing
Released by Century Media on 11 November 1991, recorded at Morrisound with Tom Morris and Schaffer producing, and the only Iced Earth album with John Greely singing and Rick Secchiari on drums, Night of the Stormrider is the record that showed the shape of the branch at its clearest, and the succession that followed made the point permanent. Matt Barlow arrived for Burnt Offerings in April 1995 and stayed through Something Wicked This Way Comes on 22 June 1998, and when Barlow left in 2003 the band hired Tim "Ripper" Owens, who had sung for Judas Priest from 1996 until that year, so that the lineage of the high British voice ended up, quite literally, standing in front of an American thrash rhythm guitar on The Glorious Burden in 2004.
The other road out of the crossing went darker rather than higher. Built on Jeff Loomis's guitars, produced, engineered and mixed by Andy Sneap, who had played guitar in the British thrash band Sabbat, and released by Century Media on 17 October 2000, the Seattle quartet that carried Warrel Dane's voice out of Sanctuary's wreckage was Nevermore, and Dead Heart in a Dead World reached 57 in Germany while the shops filed it under progressive, groove and thrash at once. Hardly anyone filed it as power metal. The singer was the same man who had fronted Refuge Denied.
Helstar's Nosferatu, recorded at Rampart Studios in Houston with Bill Metoyer producing and released by Metal Blade in 1989, built the first half of its running order on Bram Stoker's novel, with James Rivera singing over riffing that Metal Archives reviewers call power thrash, and it is filed now under power and speed metal both.
So the branch is a crossing more often than a home. Metal Church passed through it on the way to progressive metal, Nevermore on the way to something nobody has named well, and only Iced Earth set up house there and stayed for three decades, changing singers as other bands change strings. That is why the question of where a heavier American band belongs keeps coming back, and why is Manowar power metal is argued on the same ground from the opposite side: a band whose voice was never the replaceable part.
