Razor - Violent Restitution (1988)^{Release ID: 2902}

I've been very busy with metal today.  And I am two albums away from completing my third List Challenge on Metal Academy: it all ends with Razor's Violent Restitution.  Now the first two Razor albums (heard them both with a replay of The Years of Decay in between) were good thrash exercises with properly noisy production, but neither one was able to impress me on the technical side other than featuring the band being self-aware enough not to go into overdone six-to-eight-minute territory.  So they were pretty good, but that's about it.  This album's different.  The three-minute intro makes a point of going the extra mile in aggression while giving us some much weirder solos and more unpredictability by going even faster than ever.  When they pull the buzzsaw out, it might as well be replacing the guitarists and you'd barely notice.  That kind of revelation gave me a similar feeling as Todd Rundgren's motorcycle-style guitar solo in Bat Out of Hell.  That same song, named Taste the Floor, boasts a number of wild decisions and twists in its two-minute runtime.  That's the album these guys made. Of course, since many of these songs are between 2 and 3 minutes, it's safe to assume that many of these songs have the same basic goal: be a buzzsaw, a hyperactive and indomitable exercise in the thrash energy and production that defined them.  Rarely does the album take any time to slow down, with the best example being Edge of the Razor, the longest track on the album (4 minutes 15 seconds).  But a dozen songs of the same formula can still get tiring, so by the end, it becomes obvious that this album should never even have been 40 minutes.

So this is easily the most fun Razor album out of the three I've heard, and like many other thrash albums, the reason for its status as an essential is because it manages to be so freakin' heavily and pull it off.  But there's not a lot of originality among the excitement and riffs, so that's enough to knock off a full star from a perfect rating for me.

80

Canadians Razor are one of those second-tier thrash metal bands who don't get a huge amount of credit due to the fact that their version of thrash metal is seen as derivative and unevolving. But, despite this, there are plenty of real thrash fans who can hear their quality and who can see their lack of evolution as a mark of consistency. How many boss-level thrash acts failed miserably when trying to evolve their sound and consequently became followers instead of leaders anyway? 

Well, I digress. Razor played a particularly fast and aggressive version of speed-infused thrash metal and produced some of the best purely visceral albums of the eighties, their output being heaven for the headbanging hordes and a boon for 21st century chiropractors! From the very beginning they went on the offensive, releasing two albums in '85, Executioner's Song and Evil Invaders, both of which were terrific and then went on to release an album each year until reaching their peak in '88 with Violent Restitution, the subject of this here review and, spoiler alert, my favourite of theirs.

The cover of Violent Restitution shows a bloodied, turbo-charged chainsaw and is as good a metaphor for the album's contents as any amount of words could convey. The album kicks off with a breakneck instrumental, The Marshall Plan, that itself opens up with a lung-busting, sustained scream from singer Stace "Sheepdog" McLaren (for whom this was the last outing with the band who would be much reduced by his departure) that could rival Tom Araya's intro to Angel of Death. Following that are thirteen tracks of thrash metal blitzkrieg with all but three of the songs weighing in at under three minutes. Razor aren't aiming for subtlety or much variety here, this is just fast and furious Fuck You thrash metal that makes no excuses and no apologies with riffs that are more infectious than covid and a relentless battery of thrashbeats. When he's not emitting marrow-freezing screams, "Sheepdog"'s vocals sound like he gargles rusty nails each morning and all that is topped off with some brilliant shredding solos. 

Occasionally the band slip down a gear with a more groove-laden riff, even slipping into Venom-like speed riffs a couple of times, but in the main this is all hi-octane stuff. Yes, it is absolutely true that there is nothing new or original here, but this is just so vicious, infectious and fucking METAL, how could any true, red-blooded thrasher not love it? I never saw Razor live, but I can imagine the pit at their shows being fucking brutal. Balls-out and uncompromising - vital ingredients for great thrash metal.