Album Review: Ireful - Agents of Doom
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Once upon a time, in a mythical place called Germany, there was a band called Destruction. They had their highs and lows, ebbs and flows, but overall they defined what thrash was and is for a lot of people. Oh sure, your Metallicas, your Megadeths, your Slayers, might dust them sales-wise. But even so, that scratchy distortion, that atonal wailing, that punk-but faster percussion, the youthful exuberance and raw passion to just thrash your face clear from it’s moorings...it speaks to people. That, I think, is the spring from which Ireful draw water.
Thrash can sit in an odd spot. If you want extremity, then black, death, and grind sit over there, whereas if anthems are your poison, then traditional metal sits over there. Where, then, is thrash to place itself? I’m overthinking things though. Little remains so satisfying as a well done thrash album, the last stop between the bleaker domains of extreme metal while still one step over the line of your Maidens and Priests. And it’s that devotion to the thrash template that forms both Ireful’s greatest strength and countervailing weakness. If someone were to say “Destruction fronted by Steve Souza from Exodus” they would have told you everything you could need to know about what this release sounds like. It sits resolutely on that part of your brain that responds to speedy riffwork and kick-snare drumcraft and mercilessly pounds it into oblivion. At it’s best you get expansive yet vicious cuts like “Blackhearted Master”, with it’s slow -build introduction growing meaner and meaner only to slam the accelerator through the floor at about the 1:50 mark. You get the sheer Justice of the palm-mute marathon of the title track. You get the best Metallica solo that Kirk Hammett never wrote on “Exiles for Metal” with it’s simple but ebola-catchy licks and wah-pedal abuse. The spirit of Thrash weaves and coils about “Agents of Doom”, a snarling creature of wiry, fur clad muscle and bared fangs.
At it’s worst though, the album’s potential is curbed by it’s conservatism. Interesting ideas like the off-kilter introduction to “Evil Genius” stand out from the rest of the “Agents of Doom” palette, only to be dropped and never revisited. Tracks like “A.B Normal” are serviceable but generic, featuring nothing that the rest of the album hasn’t done better. Spin after spin, the album entertains in the moment but little sticks with me. I’ve heard this material before, not least in the classics of the 80s, but also in that wave of post-millenium thrash bands that gave us Municipal Waste, Evile, Havok and Warbringer, but also bands that probably no one outside the band members themselves have thought about in years, like Hyades or Fuelled by Fire. Time will tell whether Ireful can distinguish themselves enough to fit into the former phylum or not. Certainly the performances and occasional flashes of inspiration here suggest that Ireful have that longevity within them, though for now one can only hope that they capitalise on that promise and do more to distinguish themselves from their forebears.
Particularly with thrash I sometimes wonder what the legacy of an album released now might be if you were to excise and cast it hurtling back through time to those halcyon days when Thrash was sovereign. Slotted alongside Eternal Devastation or Persecution Mania, would we talk of it too with the same breathless reverence? Food for thought, but obviously we’ll never know. Released now though, in the year of our Lord 2024, “Agents of Doom” honours and supplements its antecedents, but it doesn’t surpass or supplant them, nor is it ever really more than the sum of it’s parts. But let’s not conclude on a dour note. I enjoy this album. It hooks into a sound I grew up with; as a 90’s baby I missed the initial movement but, finding little to love in early 2000’s metalcore, I turned instead to the thrash and death greats of yesteryear; I remember bringing home “Bonded by Blood” by Exodus and “Legion” by Deicide on CD and just devouring them both, back to back on repeat for hours at a time. The addiction scarce paused; Darkness Descends, and Hell Awaits. A Spectrum of Death moves Among The Living. Bedevilled by Morbid Visions and Schizophrenia, I went In Search of Sanity, only to find myself Twisted to Form, subjected to Bloody Vengeance by a Demon Preacher wielding Agent Orange, thereafter to Ride the Lightning and finally settle into Rigor Mortis. Chaos ensued – with Terrible Certainty we heard of Slaughter In The Vatican, administered via Chemical Invasion. The Extreme Aggression may have passed for now, but it shall always Leave Scars.
I mention all this to point out that this sound, classic thrash, is integral to my musical tastes, and therefore to who I am as a person. There is a joy, genuine and pure, to hearing classic thrash alive and well. And maybe that’s all that need be said here. Nostalgia can’t blind me to it’s shortcomings, but in the end, if you like thrash then you will most likely enjoy this.
