Axegressor – Last (Listenable Records)
Tuesday, 8th July 2014
One cannot help but be mildly incredulous of the interest in Finland’s Lost Society, who while enjoyable for a brief moment, don’t stand to have much lasting effect. Maybe it’s because they’re a bunch of young Finnish dudes playing thrash, when we’re so used to seeing young Finnish dudes play melodic death metal. That’s probably it. But, the band’s quasi-success will invariably open the door for some like-minded countrymen to sneak their way through, which pertains to the topic at hand, the goofily-named Axegressor. Citing all of the usual influences (more on them in a second), the band puts its heads down in traditional fashion on Last, their third full-length.
The appropriate and extra-obvious nods to Destruction’s Infernal Overkill, and most notably, Pleasure to Kill and forward Kreator are doled out without much consideration to originally, of which the band has none. No big deal, as a few these cuts have some serious muscle, such as “15,” which tosses out some ferocious gang vocals towards the song’s back end, and the manic “Social Pleasure,” a song that is almost too Teutonic for its own good. It’s only fitting that vocalist Johnny Nuclear Winter makes himself out to be the bastard child of Kreator’s Mille Petrozza and Sodom’s Tom Angelripper in his vocal delivery, although it’s quite difficult to picture songs like “Lead Justice” and “Command to Last” housing vocals of any other kind.
File this one in the “take it or leave it” bin; Axegressor not providing anything in the slightest to the thrash genre, even if they’re Finnish and playing German thrash. It all cancels each other out. Last may be a fast, hard, trip in the live arena, yet trying to peg the album as anything else other mid-80s hero worship would be a disservice to the band’s that came well before them.
