Southern California produced the most extreme American thrash of the 1980s and gets remembered for one band. The scene around Slayer was larger, faster and considerably stranger than the histories allow, and it existed in explicit hostility to the industry ten miles up the road.
What Los Angeles was
Two cities in one, musically. The Sunset Strip by 1983 was a functioning industry of hairspray, spandex and A and R men, with venues, managers and money. The heavy underground existed alongside it in complete opposition.
A Los Angeles thrash band was not competing with other thrash bands. It was competing with the idea that heavy music should be attractive, and it responded by making itself as unattractive as possible. That is why the southern Californian dialect is the most extreme in America: extremity was the argument.
Dark Angel
The most underrated band in American thrash. Darkness Descends in 1986 is faster than Reign in Blood, was released six weeks after it, and is barely mentioned in the standard accounts.
Gene Hoglan's drumming on it changed what the instrument was expected to do in this genre: limb independence from fusion, parts that are written rather than played, and a level of invention nobody in America was approaching. He was twenty.
They were on an independent with no promotional budget, the line up changed constantly, and they had the misfortune to release the year's most extreme record into the same eight weeks as its two most famous ones.
Hirax
From Cypress, and among the fastest and shortest of the American bands. Raging Violence in 1985 has Katon W. De Pena singing in a high register over material that is essentially crossover in its brevity, and the band have kept going in various forms for four decades.
Abattoir, Evildead, Wargasm
Abattoir appeared on Metal Massacre and fed members into several other bands. Evildead came out of Agent Steel and made two good records at the end of the decade. Wargasm were fast and politically direct and are almost completely forgotten.
Around them, Agent Steel, who sit between thrash and speed metal with a very high clean vocal, and Bitch, who were on the first Metal Massacre and fronted by Betsy Bitch.
| Band | Record | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitch | Be My Slave | 1983 | Early Metal Blade, and a woman fronting it |
| Hirax | Raging Violence | 1985 | Very fast, very short |
| Agent Steel | Skeptic's Apocalypse | 1985 | Thrash with a clean high vocal |
| Abattoir | Vicious Attack | 1985 | The connective tissue of the scene |
| Dark Angel | Darkness Descends | 1986 | The fastest record of its year |
| Wargasm | Why Play Around? | 1988 | Fast, political, forgotten |
| Evildead | Annihilation of Civilization | 1989 | Out of Agent Steel |
Metal Blade
The scene's infrastructure, and effectively one man in a record shop in Woodland Hills. Brian Slagel's compilations put most of these bands on vinyl for the first time, and his label released Slayer, Bitch, Abattoir and a substantial part of what southern California produced.
What that meant practically is that a Los Angeles band with no prospects could get onto a record that shops would stock, which is the single most important thing that happened to this scene.
Why it is remembered as one band
Because Slayer got out and nobody else did. Def Jam distribution, a Rick Rubin production and a record that ended an argument will do that, and once one band from a scene becomes the story the rest become context.
There is also a geographic problem. The Bay Area had a room, a radio show and an identity; southern California had a scene spread across an enormous city with no equivalent centre, which makes it harder to write about and easier to reduce.
The labels that carried all of it are in the East Coast piece and the full account is in Los Angeles, New York and the Big Four.
Gene Hoglan
The single most consequential musician to come out of this scene apart from the members of Slayer, and worth a section because his career maps the whole of extreme metal.
He started as a teenager working for Slayer, joined Dark Angel at nineteen, and played on the fastest American record of 1986. He then went on to Death, Testament, Strapping Young Lad, Dethklok and a long list of others, and is regarded across several genres as one of the two or three best drummers heavy music has produced.
What makes him unusual is that he arranges as well as plays. Several of the bands he has worked with credit him with structural writing rather than just parts, which is not a common line on a drummer's contribution.
The venues
Los Angeles had no equivalent of Ruthie's Inn, and that absence explains a good deal about why the scene is remembered as scattered.
What it had instead was a set of rooms spread across an enormous city, plus backyard parties and rented halls, which is how Slayer were first seen playing an Iron Maiden cover. That produced bands who did not necessarily know each other well and an audience that did not gather in one place.
Against that, the Bay Area's whole identity was a building on San Pablo Avenue. Scenes are geography, and southern California's geography is hostile to the kind of scene the East Bay had.
Where to start
Darkness Descends, which is the record from this scene that most deserves to be better known and which will settle immediately whether the southern Californian extreme is for you. Then Raging Violence for the short and fast end, then Skeptic's Apocalypse for the strangest.
Three albums, under two hours, and a scene that most accounts reduce to one band becomes a place with a range.
And one caveat about the geography. Several of the bands here are from towns an hour outside Los Angeles proper, and the scene extended into Orange County and further south. Southern Californian thrash is a more accurate description than Los Angeles thrash, and it is used here only because that is what everybody calls it.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Several of these bands have complicated line up histories and the records named are the ones generally regarded as their best.
