Ripper (CHL) - Raising the Corpse (2014)^{Release ID: 16671}

For the longest time it seemed like thrash metal was dead. For most of the nineties and 2000s it lay on a cold slab, nothing more than a lifeless husk. It's former heroes had either sold out, lost the magic touch or just plain old given up. Then, as the second decade of the 21st century approached, a small group of bands from Chile, like a South American Dr. Frankenstein, began to breathe new life into it's inert corpse. Bands like Force of Darkness and Hades Archer combined black metal with thrash, which was not a new concept, but the Chileans made it their own by sheer force of personality. These were then followed by bands like Demoniac, Critical Defiance and the subject of this review, Ripper. These bands took the more aggressive thrash of Slayer and Kreator and took it in a bit more of a technical direction to produce some truly brilliant albums of insane thrashing madness.

Raising the Corpse is a maelstrom of high velocity thrash riffing, demonic drumming and evil, rasping vocals that is as thrilling in reality as it sounds on paper. It isn't a million miles away from the mid-eighties deaththrash of an album like Seven Churches, albeit with better production. Speaking of the production, the one point that lets the album down is that the solos sound buried and shoved down in the mix when compared to the rhythm guitar and are even threatened by the bass at times which is very prominent, as seems fairly common in modern Chilean thrash metal. That is a fairly minor annoyance though and doesn't kill the album because the songs are pretty damn good, the playing is technically superb and it has energy and adrenaline to spare, so for a modern thrash album there isn't really much more you could ask for is there?