Noisem– Agony Defined (A389 Records)
It's difficult to suggest that an album successfully replicates a specific era of bygone music without the implicit suggestion that it's some sort of pale imitation. No matter how good it may be, that its influences are worn so proudly on the sleeve can often suggest a lack of creativity. But really getting inside the mindset of a certain era, especially one that had come and gone prior to the artist's birth, is a daunting challenge, one requiring the same level of imagination to pull off successfully as any attempt at a new aesthetic. So while Noisem manages to convincingly approximate the sort of bands populating metal's outermost fringes circa 1984-1987 or so (an era that came and went before the members were even a gleam in their respective parents' eyes), they attack the style with such ferocity that their music cannot be written off as mere tribute.
Agony Defined, the band's first full-length establishes its modus operandi from the start, kicking off with a whammy-bar heavy guitar solo before settling into a breakneck pace that continues for the album's entirety. The songs situate themselves in the blurry nexus between thrash metal's harshest periphery and the sort of early death metal that reached its apex during the genre's nascent years. There isn't much present that acts as an outlier for the style (though a handful of tasteful gang vocal parts add impact to some of the choruses), but it's all brilliantly assembled. While relating an artist's output to a handful of points of comparison can sometimes seem overly reductionist, in this case likening Noisem's album to early Possessed or Morbid Angel circa Abominations Of Desolation could hardly be taken as an insult.
It will be interesting to see how Noisem develops, however. While there's not a bad moment on the album, the bands from which they draw the most inspiration were typically the ones that could accent their frantic speed with some sort of contrasting element, some sludgy part, atmospheric element, breakdown, something. Not so Noisem, who alternate between fast and faster for nearly the entirety of the album. The brief exceptions to this, such as the momentary half-time breaks in “Severed” and “Split From The Inside Out,” artfully emphasize the frantic violence of the parts that sandwich them, and are executed so well that it's hard not to wish for a few more. Again, the overall stylistic uniformity isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the ability to incorporate some sense of nuance and flow is what separates the good bands from the great, and the great bands from the legendary. That said, much attention has been paid to the age of the band's members, all of whom are between fifteen and twenty years old. While this isn't necessarily unheard of (Chuck Schuldiner was sixteen when he formed the pre-Death band Mantas, and Jeff Beccera was seventeen when Possessed got its start), and while Noisem are better than pretty much any current band with members their age, they're still young both as musicians and as a band, and it's difficult to imagine them not improving with subsequent releases.
So, though Noisem re-writes no rule books with their debut, the content is delivered with such unrelenting abandon that this ultimately does not matter in the slightest. Agony Defined doesn't stop ripping from the opening drum fill until the last song's abrupt conclusion. And though it strongly recalls a bygone era, the album comes off as more a distillation of the best qualities of that period's bands, the ones whose work was characterized by a constant push against the boundaries of viciousness and extremity. While the work from which Noisem draws inspiration has become a standard unto itself in the subsequent quarter-century, the energy and intensity with which the band approaches their music are rarely paralleled. Not only is this one of the better thrash metal albums released in recent years but, given how new the band is, it's likely to only be the groundwork upon which they build still greater things. Anybody with any interest in this sort of metal would do well to get on board now.