Five cousins from Daly City, a drummer who was fourteen at the sessions, a debut containing a ten minute instrumental, and a producer who was the lead guitarist of the biggest band in the genre. None of that should have produced a good record and it produced one of the best debuts thrash has.
Who they were
Five Filipino American cousins who had been playing together since primary school in the Bay Area, which is the single most important fact about them. A band assembled from an advertisement takes three years to develop the telepathy that a family has by default, and The Ultra-Violence is audibly the work of people who can turn on a beat without discussing it.
Rob Cavestany on guitar and Andy Galeon on drums were the writers. Galeon was born in 1972; the album was recorded in 1987. He was fourteen.
The Kirk Hammett demo
In 1986 the band recorded a demo, Kill as One, produced by Kirk Hammett, who had seen them play and thought they were worth the afternoon. That tape moved on the trading network, reached Enigma, and got them a deal while the members were still at school.
It is worth noticing how ordinary that is for the period. A famous musician producing a teenage band's demo for nothing, a cassette doing the work of a marketing department, and a label signing on the strength of it: that is simply how the Bay Area worked in 1986.
The record
Recorded in about three days in Santa Rosa for a budget of a few thousand dollars, and it sounds like it in the best way: dry, close, and audibly the sound of five people in a room going as fast as they can.
The title track is a ten minute instrumental, which for a debut by teenagers is either arrogance or confidence and turns out to be the second. It holds together, it develops, and it does not drag, which are three things a great many experienced bands cannot manage over that length.
Elsewhere the record is fast, melodic in a way the Bay Area's first wave was not, and considerably more sophisticated harmonically than anybody expected. Cavestany was writing riffs at sixteen that most of the scene's adults were not.
What happened next
Frolic Through the Park in 1988 is stranger, funkier and more ambitious, and it divided the audience immediately. Act III in 1990, produced by Max Norman, is the band's best made record and the one where the songwriting fully arrives.
Then, in 1991, on tour in the Nevada desert, their bus crashed. Andy Galeon was seriously injured and needed more than a year to recover, the singer left rather than wait, and the band effectively stopped. They were all in their early twenties.
| Album | Year | Label | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kill as One (demo) | 1986 | Unreleased | Produced by Kirk Hammett, got them signed |
| The Ultra-Violence | 1987 | Enigma | Three days, and a ten minute instrumental |
| Frolic Through the Park | 1988 | Enigma | Stranger, and divisive |
| Act III | 1990 | Geffen | The best made, and the last for a decade |
Why the record still works
Because it has something almost no other thrash debut has, which is joy. Most of the founding records are angry or frightening or both; this one sounds like five people who cannot believe they are being allowed to do this, playing as fast as they physically can because it is enjoyable.
That is not a small thing in a genre with this much scowling in it, and it is a large part of why Death Angel are the band from this period whose reunion made the most sense. They came back in 2001, have released seven albums since, and are demonstrably better now than they were at seventeen, which is a sentence that can be written about almost nobody else in this history.
Where it sits
Alongside Bonded by Blood and The Legacy as one of the three essential Bay Area debuts, and ahead of both on sheer improbability. The other two were made by adults who had been playing in bars. This one was made by children.
The band that arrived alongside them and had almost exactly the same luck is covered in Forbidden Evil and Eternal Nightmare, and the full account of the period is in The Golden Years.
What the record sounds like now
Younger than almost anything else from the period, and that is not only because of the ages involved.
The playing is fast and slightly loose in a way that a band with more studio time would have tightened out, and the tightening would have cost the record most of what makes it work. There are moments where the tempo climbs because everybody is excited, and moments where a transition arrives half a beat early, and both are audible and both are the point.
Set against the 1986 records, which are the work of bands at the peak of their control, The Ultra-Violence is a document of five people discovering what they can do while the tape is running. Very few records in this genre sound like that, because very few were made by people who had not yet learned to be careful.
The Bay Area's family bands
Death Angel are the clearest case of something the East Bay produced more than once: a band assembled out of an existing relationship rather than out of an advertisement.
Testament came out of a group of school friends. Exodus were a neighbourhood band. Possessed were teenagers from the same few streets. Against that, the Los Angeles scene was largely built by musicians who had moved there to be in a band, which is a different starting condition and produces a different kind of group.
The difference shows in the playing. A band who have been together since primary school do not need to rehearse the changes; they simply arrive at them together, and at these tempos that is worth more than any amount of technique.
Sources and notes
Ages refer to the period of the 1987 sessions. The 1991 bus crash occurred during the Act III touring cycle. Label details refer to original pressings.
