This is without a doubt one of my favourite thrash metal albums of all time.
I would to listen to the cassette endlessly (thru Walkman headphones) as the soundtrack to my senior year of high school. It wasn’t the greatest album in metal history, but there’s something genuine and magical about this record that I’m going to try and unravel here:
- Wicked Dynamics. When it thrashes; it thrashes silly. When it’s time to get moody; the band crouches down in darkened stagelights and makes menacing faces. They are unbearably tight as an ensemble, elastic and funky as players, and groovy beyond thrash metal’s bounds. No ordinary soft-loud-soft approach here.
- Awesome Ozzy–meets-Chuck Billy vocals. And that description’s only kinda close: Adrian Hahn has this darkly melodic, gruff bellow that dances over peculiar phrasings and occasions of punctuated scat. The guy is theatrical, emotive, and completely entertaining.
- Obscure Political References. The coolest section of one of the best songs (“Superior Being”) mentions ‘Kashoggi‘ and the ‘Likud Party‘ – both beyond my awareness at age 16. Sure, now – 20 years later – I’m looking them up for the first time, but they made for great sounding lyrics… in any era.
More could be said of Grinder, but by now you should be listening to the music. This was actually the last of their four releases as Grinder, before becoming the all-too-obscure Capricorn. ‘Nothing Is Sacred’ is an accomplished, confident German thrash album with great sequencing, placing the one somewhat goofy track (“The Nothing Song”) right before the raging closer “NME”.
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