Review by Vinny for Necrosis (CHL) - The Search (1988)

As you can see from the rating, The Search is not without its challenges for me.  Notwithstanding that this album was recorded nearly forty-years ago and that I suspect that they did not have the most advanced studio to work with, this took me back to the wrong side of the old school, blunting some of the sharper nostalgia that can normally carry a portion of such albums.  I mean, I have no experience of Necrosis before this month and so I had no familiarity to work from that may have been triggered somewhere in my aging brain.  Hence, the performance, although adept enough, is not captured as well as it could be.

In the main though, I just can't get past the vocals.  They are just too weak to the point of being whiny; unable to stack up against the rest of the instrumentation, especially the guitar work which is a good few notches above the vocal performance.  Increasingly, as I listened through the record, I found it hard to penetrate the skin of the record and pick out any individual moments to reflect upon.  The album as a result just became this mass of thrash music, without any clear delineation between tracks.  In short, it soon became a bit of a slog.

In the end I found myself listening to the album to almost try and outrun the vocals, just so I could hopefully get long enough away from them to enjoy the music itself.  Alas, I did not have the legs to last the course of that little mindgame and so The Search remains a discovery that I am unlikely to revisit.