Annihilator

Even though mastermind Jeff Waters started Annihilator twenty-five years ago, during a time when thrash was the marquee sound, he still has managed to recreate the band over the years. Just look at the group’s last effort simply titled “Metal.” Waters brought in a gallery of metal legends and injected the album with a modern sound. Water’s newest, self-titled opus continues this development, while retaining the thrash style Waters first introduced three decades ago.

Here, Waters mixes up each track. He gives the listener a clinic in guitar shredding (the album claims sixty-six guitar solos), moves into modern metal territory and even death metal, but never forsakes his thrash roots. The epic seven-minute track, “The Trend” illustrates the album’s diversity. During a two-minute instrumental in the beginning, the track begins with Joe Satriani type solos, but hits a death metal churn before the two-minute mark, and then dives into old school thrash to welcome the first verse.

“Coward” cleverly mixes old school thrash with modern metal, in particular, mixing vocal harmonies. During the singing parts, Padden’s strong delivery brings to mind Matt Heafy of Trivium (Trivium’s Corey Beaulieu made a guest appearance on “Metal.”) The thrash parts are more authentic than Trivium, though. Hell, these guys often drew comparisons to Metallica, a band Trivium has paid homage to. Often, Annihilator has been dubbed the Metallica of Canada. Padden does Annihilator a great service in his understanding of traditional thrash and the newer movements.

Also of note are Jeff Water’s bass parts. He builds a bridge between the opening movements through a sliding bass lick on “Betrayed.” “25 Seconds” features a reoccurring funky bass-drum dual between Water’s and Ryan Ahoff. Water’s seemingly shoots lighting out of his fingers near the mid way point, which is fitting for the taser-first-ask-questions-later lyrical theme.

While Padden’s vocals should find favor with the younger, metalcore-oriented crowd, his pipes will be an issue of content with fans of pure thrash vocals. The other problem with this album is the Van Halen cover “Romeo Delight,” which appears at the end of the album. I can understand why Jeff Waters wanted to put a Van Halen cover because Eddie Van Halen is a shredder’s god, but this track felt a bit out of place.

All points of negation aside, Waters and company deserve credit for being true artists and not creating the same album over and over again. Annihilator’s invigorating display on this self-titled effort shows he still has a few good albums of metal annihilation left.