Reviews list for Destruction - The Least Successful Human Cannonball (1998)

Despite being in the Pit for my love of Metallica, can't say I'm very in tune with groove metal. I give it chances on and off, but have little interest in a deep exploration at this time. This is partially because so many classic thrash bands made the switch to at as quickly as the European prog giants of the 70's switched to AOR and pop rock, and the results were about the same: middling and generic. Of course, I can't deny that a part of me absolutely loves the album Invisible Touch by Genesis more than my technical rating states (which is already sitting pretty at 93). But how can I complete my Destruction marathon without getting through an album so bad it might as well be Lulu? It's a key part of their history just like Risk is for Megadeth, and I plan on stopping at their comeback album, The Antichrist. So, here we go.

Aside from a half-cocked album cover that looks less like a thrash album and more like a screenshot of a Monty Python animation with a quickly placed cheap font for a logo because "money's tight," I found it easy not to hate the album, shall we put it. Now I encourage change and variety so that a band can prove they're capable of many other things, thus potentially improving greatness by virtue of multiple talents. But how does this groove album stack up against the others? Well, with the groove aspect and slower tempos maintaining SOME of the thrash genre that defined them, this newfound love of the 90's sound fails to stand out. Catchiness is spotty and riffs are pretty done before. On top of which, it's pretty obvious how much of their previous identity they forsook for this new route. I'm sure if they had bothered to diversify their earliest albums more so that stuff like this feels a little more natural, this wouldn't have happened. I mean, the vast majority of these groove songs do more or less the same thing, which in itself is hardly a surprise considering that it's a Destruction album. There's a rare exeption in Brother of Cain which goes into some major thrash power. Otherwise, it hardly gets interesting at all, and mostly just worries about getting on 90's radio. So this really doesn't do Destruction, or the groove world, any favors. Having said that, it's still a bit better than those two groove EP's they did in the eight years between this album and their last, Cracked Brain, so it's not terrible, just not promising.