With the coming of teeny-bopper thrashers Black Tide and their effortless success, the thrash genre seems to be waning. More and more new bands are rehashing the same old material Testament did 20 years ago, while somehow making it worse in the process. Even 90’s bands got it right, and soon the good bands got the hint to start evolving. That being said, I’m continually disgusted how a majority of bands get signed when their sound has no character, or rather just borrows someone else’s.
Virgin Snatch is a thrash/death band from Poland, and they write your basic thrash songs with some added clean vocals. The Slayer rhythms, the Kreator aggression, the middle eastern leads, you’ve heard it all before…even the one slow song. Granted, they can play their instruments well, but that doesn’t mean anything if you can’t utilize the skill. One listen through this record is a bit much; 40 minutes of predictability can wear you out.
The guitars retain the signature crunchy sound, but they don’t touch their amps once to change the sound, even slightly. There’s very little melodic touch, even during the clean parts, and this all makes the whole album consistent, but in a bad way. Naturally, there’s no audible bass, so why do these bands have bass players, they’re just another mouth to feed…moving on. Drum-wise, it’s your standard affair. Though, if it weren’t for the drums being as well written/arranged as they are, this would probably be nigh unbearable to listen to (mainly due to the vocals), but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t use triggers.
The songwriting process must have been quite a quickie. Just about every song is arranged in similar structure, within 20 beats on the metronome, and every solo is muffled with wah pedals. A huge problem they tend to run into is the false hint of a build-up. For example, in Purge My Stain, there's an acoustic break for two bars, and the double bass and tremolo riffs are already fading back in; therefore misusing certain composition tools, making things even worse. And, just for fun, they decided to add to the monotony. The vocals are either mid-range screams, or nasal singing. Not only just nasal singing, but all the key words seem to end in something that rhymes with “me” or “velocity” or “policy” or whatever…not to mention they are poorly arranged. By the way, a telemarketer just called me “HI THIS IS JOHN FROM ‘KIDS FIRST’, HOW ARE YOU!” I think I’d rather talk to him than keep listening to this.
SO…here’s what we got. Imagine everything you hate about Into Eternity, dematurize the clean vocals, and throw in all your favorite Exodus riffs into a wood chipper, shove it in the cooch of a carcass, and you’ve got Virgin Snatch, the “only band” who thinks having a political anthem called IN THE NAME OF…BLOOOOOOOD is necessary, and that’s not the only political song, folks… Yeah, gotta go, John is waiting.
