Album Review: Obnoxious Youth - Burning Savage
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Obnoxious Youth vex me. In places, “Burning Savage” feels every inch the unholy union of classic metal and hardcore punk that forms the nucleotides in early thrash DNA. “Lethal Revenge” or “Ethereal Termination” sounds like Motorhead might if Lemmy took all the amphetamines he ever did over his whole life in one night, whereas elsewhere “Bitchkrieg” channels the messy quintessence of punk titans Discharge. Then again, an early track such as “Imminent Evil” is reminiscent of the madder extents of early Teutonic or Latin American thrash, summoning forth classics such as Kreator’s “Endless Pain” or Sepultura’s “Morbid Visions” for points of comparison. They’re unrefined and unkempt, but possessed of a seething, inexorable will to stamp your teeth into splinters.
But the flipside to Obnoxious Youth is that they’re also unfortunately incoherent. The saturnine strains of “Torrents of Black Blood”, more reminiscent of the morose affectations of Candlemass or Cathedral, sits awkwardly in the midst of the black thrash onslaught. Elsewhere, spooky Scooby-Doo bullshit abounds with campy clown-shoes compositions like “Omega Therion” that sound like Nosferatu searching for his car keys in a circus tent. The album seesaws between brief, spiky attempts to visit grievous harm upon your neck muscles like “Phantasma” (which actually reminds me a bit of Converge if I look at it askance) and longer explorations of their sound like “Tornado of blades”; this isn’t inherently unwise as an approach, but the elements they yank together don’t always work in concert with each other. NWOBHM licks the likes of a retro Iron Maiden release lurch gracelessly into scathing blasts of hardcore punk, such as on the title track “Burning Savage”, leaving you with songs that aren’t bad exactly in terms of their component parts, but feel disjointed, haphazard, disparate. Some songs have these kooky “Halloween best hits soundtrack bought from a charity shop” keyboard introductions that last 20 or 30 seconds – not long by most standards, but an ill fit for songs that are otherwise attempting to scour your face off with a pressure washer.
On the more positive side, there is much to laud about the performances and production here. Vocals – handled by a gentleman cheerfully known as “Coffin” – are unruly and misanthropic, a phlegm-gargling midrange rasp that slots well into whichever style Obnoxious Youth decide to embody that day. The music frequently reaches incautious speeds, flying through the neighbourhood at pensioner-mulching velocities; accordingly the drumming by a man with another sunny moniker (“Cult”) is appropriately wild, switching tempos and rhythms at a second’s notice. Guitars are crunchy, and solos are nimble-fingered and curiously bluesy, again leaning more into the classic metal stylings evident elsewhere on “Burning Savage”. Also, praise Satan, for the bass is present and ready, warm and hefty in the mix. If I’m finding the album in sum total something of a mismatched clash of styles, there is at least no point at which I had any similar issues with the production itself. On the contrary, I’d love a full-fledged thrash metal release painting from an identical palette to “Burning Savage”.
Coming down to the level of slightly more painful confessions, part of the issue here is that I don’t particularly care for hardcore punk, and there is just no escaping it on this album. This means that at any moment I am about a minute or two from musical tropes that simply don’t appeal to me. It also means that if hardcore punk is more appealing to you, then you might well get a lot more out of this album than I was able to. And to be fair, there is plenty here that I do like – on top form, I can get on board with what Obnoxious Youth offer, but on the whole the album feels like the musical equivalent of trying to build a single jigsaw out of 3 or 4 other smaller ones. The pieces jam, they twist, they obstruct, but they don’t mesh. Lord knows, Obnoxious youth are clearly a talented bunch, and I can imagine that they would slay live, but for me the abiding sense is that I wish they’d just pick a particular style and stick to it instead of the schizophrenic mess I’m currently sat with.
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