Album Review: Violator - Unholy Retribution
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I think a lot of metal in the 90’s gets much maligned on spurious grounds – we can all pretend we hate nu metal, but if you’re reading this then I’d put bullion on a wager that you are, at any given point, roughly teo pints of nothing especially strong away from jumping around like you’re trying to dodge snipers the second Limp Bizkit start playing. You can pretend to only like it ironically. It’s fine. Lie to yourself if you must, but you can’t lie to me. I’ll defend it all day long if I have to, ManOwaR can have my true metal credentials when they can prise them from my cold dead fingers. Partially I guess whatever followed the monumental bloom of creativity in the 80’s was always going to be swimming upstream; the decade roughly kicked off with an asteroid punching through the planet’s crust with NWOBHM; the shrieking aftershocks of which have echoed ever since. The Black, championed by steadfast overlords of the stygian tide such as Venom, Bathory and early Sodom stood watch as necromantic ululations called forth Possessed from a lightless pit reaching unto infinite obsidian voids below, ushering the Death out into the world. Yet I forget one illustrious other; perhaps the most routinely saluted chapter in all metal history, liege lord of a litany of lustrous perma-classics: Thrash.
Yet not the original recipe thrash; no, Violator hail from the secnd coming. Around the early 2000’s Thrash, which if not dormant exactly had nonetheless decided a siesta of sorts was in order through the 90’s, suddenly decided it was tired of all the rapping and scarily voluminous trousers, and it was time to rejoin the offensive. This second movement was, perhaps inevitably, less revolutionary than the initial thrash explosion of the 80’s, but that isn’t to say that some damn fine releases didn’t surface from it. One of these fine releases was an unashamedly retro slice of Latin American thrash nostalgia by the nom de guerre “Chemical Assault” – Violator’s first album. We’re far enough along from that debut now that it is, of itself, intensely nostalgic. When it came out (2006) it was around 20 years on from, say, “Pleasure to Kill” or “Morbid Visions” (both 1986).
In 2025, we are almost that far removed from Chemical Assault now. I was stupid enough not to have been alive in the 80’s due to my catastrophic mistake of refusing to be born until 1991, so for as much as I adore those 80’s / early 90’s masterpieces, they don’t have the aching nostalgia that I know they will to those of you who first heard them back when they originated. But I do remember this second wave of thrash, and I do bear within me a sizeable chunk of nostalgia for that time and place in my life. So it is that I find myself, two decades on, in the same spot that many of the old-school thrash faithful must have stood in when the first efforts of the second thrash wave materialised. A new Violator album stands before us. The question on everyone’s lips...well, my lips at least – is whether it can live up to the sun-blushed memories I view under my rose-tinted glasses.
Well I’m not sold on either the flute sections or the lengthy spoken word passages in which the vocalist solemnly informs us of how much he enjoys scratching his balls and sniffing his fingers afterwards, also folk has never really been my thing. Nah, just fucking with you a bit. This is 100% proof thrash; good as it ever has been. It’s all there, the velocitous deinonychus charge of Dark Angel, the calloused bop of Anthrax, the unsavoury threat of Slayer’s atmosphere. It’s a melting pot of optimised thrash tropes fluxed and liquefied, reforged into the true steel. It summons the mentally compromised speed-freak anthemics of Sepultura’s almighty “Arise” opus on “Persection Personality”, and exhumes the human rights violation viciousness of Sodom’s “Tapping the Vein” in the enraged sprint of “Chapel of the Sick”. I catch voicings of Mr. Hammett through the solo work, in the repetition of simple but abundantly satisfying licks stacking end on end to form these webs of catchy but technically impressive lead lines in amid riffs like a drive by strafing in some internecine cartel squabble, zipping in to cut you down then spearing into the distance.
Maybe I’m leaning a bit too much on the virtues of older bands in order to contextualise the virtues of Violator, but it really does feel like the best way to explain the band. If you like, say, Morbid Saint, then you will most likely be overcome with unparalleled joy upon exposure to this album here and now. Even so, perhaps it would be a bit more relevant to ask how Violator contend against some more contemporary fruits from latter-day harvests. One of my favourite thrash albums from the last few years was the domineering genius of “Visions of Trismegistos” by Nekromantheon. Violator can’t surmount a release of that magnitude, but they are a formidable contender and belong in the same weight class. This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone; Chemical Assault was broadly received as something of a cult classic back in the day, yet after this long one could be forgiven for wondering if some steam had been lost. Yet the album dispels such ill-formed fallacies with disdainful flicks of the wrist; “Rot in Hell” adopts the most pissed off Iron Maiden gallop imaginable then dismounts the chariot and tramples you to death with raw speed. The switch from nimble leads to a crippling chug at 3.07 will crumble your knees like 100 years of rapid onset arthritis shot into your skeleton inside a heartbeat. Municipal Waste may have staked a claim to party thrash Supremacy, and certainly Violator are a fair bit less lighthearted, but even so, there is an insanely compulsive danceability component to the album as well – “Hang The Merchants of Illusion” sets the stomach to lurching as the BPM scythes down into a martial, crusading stamp of palm muted chugging goodness that promises to decapitate the unwary for miles around. There is plenty of recent thrash that I’ve deeply enjoyed – the newest Sulfator album for one example – but what a genuine pleasure it is to report that Violator, too, are right there as well, vital and strong in the here and now.
It’s 2007 and I’m holding a copy of Metal Hammer issue 168 (their golden gods issue, the one with Shagrath from Dimmu Borgir in the bottom left looking at you like he just caught you wiping your bum with his toothbrush). It was my first issue, and through that same magazine I came to learn about those new upcoming thrash bands that were forming such a seismic resurgence of the old school sound in a modern context. I listen to this new Violator release, and there I am once more, on the precipice of discovering something wonderful for the first time. There is to this day a vibrant thrash revivalist scene ongoing, with band after band pushing the boundaries of what the style is capable of. Violator harbour no such progressive instincts, but what they do aim to accomplish is to gouge in stone the standard for thrash in 2025, against which all other releases can be assessed. Those other releases may well prove superior; so be it. Violator stand regardless, smashing the flagpole into a jagged concrete chasm to tell the world that classic thrash was, is and always will be here to stay.
