Agressor - Neverending Destiny (1990)^{Release ID: 14253}

The French have a penchant for popping up at unexpected points in my music library.  I mean thrash metal (or more death/thrash in this case) doesn't automatically take one's mind to France when we talk about a European scene, with Germany firmly at the forefront of the genre here.  But when I stumbled across Agressor recently I was more than pleasantly surprised.

The mention of Teutonic thrash just now draws some reference to Agressor's sound as they do border on some of the rabid paced thrash of Kreator (for example) during the forty minutes of Neverending Destiny.  The album feels like a late eighties thrash album, notwithstanding the big and clunky drawing that adorns the album cover that reminds of the kind of stuff I used to draw on my school books, it oozes that style of the period with the band having been around since 1986.  By the time they got aorund to a debut full length they had numerous demos under their belts.  They honed their sound to give plenty of weight to the thraashy side of things but as mentioned above there is a massive amount of death metal influence here also which serves to feed that rabid nature that I also have pointed too already.

Reminiscent of the ferocity of Massacra or Merciless who also released great records in the same year, Agressor channeled their efforts into a similar wall of razor sharp riffs and frenzied tempos that rivalled their fellow French and Swedish artists.  They could pull a neat solo out the bag too and maintain that rampant pace at the same time.  All the while the military sounding drums of Thierry Pinck brought up the levels of intensity to even higher proportions.  Alex Colin-Tocquaine's vocals were a raspy and gruff affair full of threat and menace that sat perfectly in the mix here, not drowned by the raging inferno of guitars and drums around them nor at any point stealing the show.

As with most death/thrash records the levels of intensity are as much a gift as they are a curse.  The thing that keeps this rating under four stars is the fact that there is very little variation in the album which over eleven tracks becomes a bit of a slog in the long term.  That having been said there's enough entertainment here to still make this is a riot to listen through.