August 2025 Feature Release - The Pit Edition

A new month jumps out at us and it is time once more for a new set of monthly features. This essentially means that we’re asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. We’re really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our chosen releases so don’t be shy.

August sees the Metal Academy bottle-spin point to me and so it becomes my turn to select this month's feature for the Pit. I have gone with Cleveland thrashers, Crucified Mortal's, almost unknown 2016 album, Psalms of the Dead Choir.

https://metal.academy/releases/10923

Interesting choice. I'm not aware of these guys.

Interesting choice. I'm not aware of these guys.

It is getting more difficult to suggest albums that everybody isn't already familiar with because, in a way, The Pit is the most restrictive clan (after the Sphere) I feel. So I tend to check whether anyone else has rated or reviewed a release before I suggest it nowadays. Plus I have heard so many Pit releases hundreds of times that excessive familiarity often kicks in. I tend to stick with the South Americans nowadays for my thrash fix, but thought I would have a change this month.

In all honesty my love of thrash metal has faded somewhat over more recent times as I have explored further into other genres like death metal and even metalcore, plus a bit of a resurgence in my love for old-fashioned heavy metal. This has meant that I haven't really put a lot of thought into my Pit feature suggestion this month, so I just dragged a name out of my list of thrash albums from the last decade or so that I quite liked but which nobody else had rated and came up with Crucified Mortals' 2016 sophomore full-length album.

Crucified Mortals is basically a duo of vocalist, bassist and guitarist Craig Horval, aka Reaper, and drummer Ash Thomas who is actually guitarist and vocalist in a number of Ohio death metal bands. They have been joined on Psalms of the Dead Choir by Detroit lead guitarist Victor "Lore Lord" Ruiz in a guest capacity. The album is very much based on the old Slayer sound, with Reaper's vocals sounding like he is a big admirer of Max Cavalera. The riffs are pretty decent, albeit not the most original you will ever hear, but this is thrash metal almost 30 years removed from its heyday, so what do you expect? The soloing is where I scratch my head the most because Lore Lord sounds like a pretty good lead guitarist, but his solos here seem almost hesitant, as if he is uncertain of himself. Whether this is down to a misperception on my part or some hesitancy to fully express himself or lack of confidence on his part in a band that he is only performing with as a guest, I have no way of knowing. Check out the soloing towards the end of "Into Eternity" to get an idea of what I am getting at - it feels like he really wants to let rip, but is holding back for some reason.

I guess this doesn't really hold up as well as I was hoping when I suggested it and I feel my 4-star original rating is maybe a bit generous upon relistening to it. It is a perfectly fine, third tier thrash metal release that holds very few surprises for the seasoned inhabitant of the Pit. My favourite part of the album is probably the hulkingly slow intro riff to "Dusk of the Advent" which left me wondering why more thrash acts don't slow things down to a more menacing pacing sometimes, for variety's sake if nothing else. Ash Thomas' drumming is probably the one real highlight of the album for me and he seems like a very talented skinsman, despite it not necessarily being his day job.

At the end of the day this is a "C", maybe a "C+" thrash metal release and just adds fuel to the fire of my belief that the South Americans are now the only game in town when it comes to thrash metal.

I am not too familiar with Craig Horval's work but I was aware of the band Surgikill who Ash Thomas drums for (in fact quite enjoyed their debut back in 2016).  I am not a fan of Horval's vocals in all honesty and there's little else here to distract me.  With a sound reminiscent of Deceased, Rigor Mortis and Possessed there is a sense that this is just reguritation of old ideas, done much better many moons ago by others.  Some of my disenchantment with the record is more to do with my exhaustion with the thrash scene as a whole as opposed to this being a terrible album though.  That rip off of the Halloween theme tune that starts the album is ridiculous though. The Desultory cover (track 6) is clumsy but that may be the same with the original for all I know.  Anyways, not for me this one. 

3/5

Some of my disenchantment with the record is more to do with my exhaustion with the thrash scene as a whole as opposed to this being a terrible album though.  

I feel the same way. Is this a problem that many people, particularly long-standing metalheads, are having with thrash metal? Do you think it is because of the quite restrictive nature of the genre because there are not actually that many variations on the thrash metal theme are there? Unlike death, black and doom metal that can span whole different spectra of sounds, thrash generally has to conform to a tight set of criteria which can make many records sound the same. Don't get me wrong, the classics are still great, but it is very hard to find much thrash after 1990 that is genuinely awesome. Are we dealing with a dead end street here?

Some of my disenchantment with the record is more to do with my exhaustion with the thrash scene as a whole as opposed to this being a terrible album though.  

I feel the same way. Is this a problem that many people, particularly long-standing metalheads, are having with thrash metal? Do you think it is because of the quite restrictive nature of the genre because there are not actually that many variations on the thrash metal theme are there? Unlike death, black and doom metal that can span whole different spectra of sounds, thrash generally has to conform to a tight set of criteria which can make many records sound the same. Don't get me wrong, the classics are still great, but it is very hard to find much thrash after 1990 that is genuinely awesome. Are we dealing with a dead end street here?

As the guy doing the thrash clan playlist on a quarterly basis, I can absolutely attest to the restrictive nature of the genre.  Yes, you have groove metal, speed metal, tech thrash, progressive thrash, death/thrash and blackened thrash as sub-genres but at the end of the day we are still never dropping fruit that's too far from the tree.  I guess there's an argument to say it was the first real offshoot into extreme metal that took off and so logically it would be the first to get stale.  This year has seen me focus purely on black and doom/sludge in the main, so I am not ideally placed to be in the correct mindset in terms of listening to a variety of metal right now, but I have been struggling with thrash for a while now.

Yeah, genre fatigue can be a very real thing sometimes. I have had a similar crisis of faith with traditional doom metal, where every album begins to sound the same after a while with all the newer acts just trying to rip-off the classics in the hope that some of the magic rubs off on them, but it rarely does. I am not one of those people who constantly needs bands to push the boundaries, but sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. One of the reasons I am so enthused about Darkthrone's recent doomy efforts is that they are producing something I am eminently familiar with, but in an uncompromised and genuine way that sets them apart from the crowd who are climbing over the legacy of better acts and each other in an attempt to get noticed.