By 1987 a handful of bands had decided that the interesting question was no longer how hard you can hit it but how much you can get away with, and the records they made are the ones thrash listeners argue about most and recommend least.
Technical thrash is a real category with real criteria, and it produced three or four albums that belong in any serious account of what this genre was capable of.
The criteria
Harmonic strangeness: chords that are not power chords, intervals rock guitarists avoid. Rhythmic complexity: bars that are not in four, riffs displaced against the drums. An active bass playing against the guitars rather than reinforcing them. And structural refusal, where sections do not come back.
Speed is not on the list, which is why several of these records are slower than the mainstream of the genre and considerably harder to play.
Watchtower
From Austin, Texas, and the origin point for everything later called technical or progressive metal. Energetic Disassembly in 1985 has bar lengths that require concentration to follow, a bass player operating at a level that embarrasses most guitarists, and a singer working in the upper register throughout.
Almost nobody bought it and everybody in this field has heard it. The band's second album, Control and Resistance in 1989, is the more polished record and the more commonly recommended one.
Coroner
Three musicians from Zurich who had carried Celtic Frost's equipment and turned into the most formidable writing unit in European thrash. Cold, precise, harmonically alien, and with a level of structural control that nobody else in the genre approached.
No More Color in 1989 is the entry point and Mental Vortex in 1991 is the strangest. Both are considerably more intelligent than they are ever given credit for being, largely because the band never made any attempt to be liked.
Mekong Delta
The strangest project in the genre. A German studio band assembled by a producer, operating for years under pseudonyms, playing thrash with genuine classical arrangements including versions of Mussorgsky.
It should be unbearable and it is not, because the writing is serious rather than decorative. The Principle of Doubt in 1989 is the record to try.
| Album | Band | Year | Country | The feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Energetic Disassembly | Watchtower | 1985 | United States | Time signatures and bass |
| Nothingface | Voivod | 1989 | Canada | A private chord vocabulary |
| No More Color | Coroner | 1989 | Switzerland | Structural control |
| The Principle of Doubt | Mekong Delta | 1989 | Germany | Classical arrangement |
| Control and Resistance | Watchtower | 1989 | United States | The polished version |
| Rust in Peace | Megadeth | 1990 | United States | The one that sold |
| Unquestionable Presence | Atheist | 1991 | United States | Fusion at extreme speed |
What it cost the genre
Two things, and both are real.
It changed the criteria. Once the question is how well can we play this rather than how hard can we hit it, some of what made the music dangerous does not survive, and a record can be admired without being felt.
And it raised the barrier to entry. A teenager in 1984 could form a thrash band after six months of practice. By 1989 the visible standard included Watchtower and Mekong Delta, and a great many young musicians reasonably concluded that they could not compete. When death metal arrived offering a different set of virtues, a lot of them went.
Where to start
With Megadeth's Rust in Peace, which is technical and immediately enjoyable and therefore the safest door. Then Coroner's No More Color, which is the best record here on any measure.
Save Watchtower and Mekong Delta for later. They are the deep end and neither cares whether you are ready, which is precisely why the people who love them love them so much.
The bands who took the scope rather than the difficulty are in Progressive Thrash, and the full account of the period is in The Golden Years.
What happened to the players
They dispersed, and where they went explains why the category stopped being a category around 1992.
Watchtower's musicians went into session work and into jazz. Coroner stopped in 1996 and did not return for seventeen years. Mekong Delta continued sporadically under its founder. Steve DiGiorgio became the most in demand bass player in extreme metal and appears on records by half the bands in this history.
What absorbed the rest was technical death metal, which took the same virtues and applied them to a music with a larger and younger audience. Most of the players who would have made a technical thrash record in 1992 made a death metal record instead, which is the same story as the rest of the genre in miniature.
The bass, which is the tell
One practical listening note. In ordinary thrash the bass reinforces the riff and is frequently inaudible; in technical thrash it is a second voice playing against the guitars, and it is usually the fastest way to identify what you are listening to.
Put on Watchtower and follow the bass for one song. Then do the same with Atheist and with Sadus. In each case the instrument is doing something that would carry a piece on its own, and once you have heard it that way the rest of the arrangement becomes considerably easier to follow.
Where to hear the difference
One exercise that makes the category audible. Play "Angel of Death" and then play anything from No More Color.
The Slayer track is built to hit you: one idea, executed at maximum force, with everything arranged to remove anything between the listener and the impact. The Coroner track is built to be followed: the parts move against each other, the harmony goes somewhere unexpected, and the pleasure is in noticing rather than in being hit.
Neither is better. They are different jobs, and a listener who knows which one they want will save themselves a great deal of time.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. The boundary between technical thrash and early technical death metal is genuinely blurred and the selections reflect that.
