Review by Rexorcist for Razor - Violent Restitution (1988)

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