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Review: Exodus, Fleece
The Fleece’s over-excited blurb for this gig insisted that it was Exodus’s first-ever visit to Bristol in the band’s 30-year history. That’s not exactly true, as vocalist Steve Souza reminds us. He has strong memories of playing the Bierkeller back in 1989. But it’s an easy mistake to make. Today’s spoiled young metal whippersnappers, who have dozens of gigs to choose from each month, don’t realise what a musical wasteland our city was back in the eighties. Of thrash metal’s Big Four, only Anthrax got as far as Bristol during that decade. They played a memorable 1987 Colston Hall show, at which extra security staff were taken on to deal with the new-fangled tabloid panic of stage-diving.
Exodus’s slogan “good friendly violent fun” pretty much sums up these solid, second-division Bay Area thrash pioneers, who earned a footnote in rock history for bequeathing founding guitarist Kirk Hammett to Metallica. But at a time when various sub-species of tech-metal and extreme metal rule the musical roost, it’s a pleasure to be whisked back to the days when punk’s energy was first fused with metal’s musicality to launch a whole new genre in which every heads-down, riff-heavy song romped along at a furious pace with nary a tricksy time-change, blastbeat, djent tone or death grunt.
Exodus frontload the set with material from their latest album Blood In, Blood Out, something of a return to form which has become the highest-charting release of their entire career. But jovial Souza, who’s currently on his third stint with the band, knows full well that it’s “the old shit” we really crave. So it’s back to 1985’s breakthrough Bonded by Blood for the moshpit-inciting triple-whammy of Metal Command, Piranha and A Lesson in Violence. They also throw in the curio that is Impaler. Co-written by Hammett, who later recycled one of its riffs for Metallica’s Trapped Under Ice, it boasts an intro that sounds uncannily like Seek and Destroy – which Metallica recorded before he joined them. Go figure, as our American chums like to say.
is needed now More than ever
Souza’s keen to milk such illustrious connections, including a tribute to Lemmy (Exodus toured with Motorhead) and a reference to absent guitarist Gary Holt, who’s off depping for the late Jeff Hanneman in Slayer. Cue: a few bars of Raining Blood. Still, the encore reminds us that they’ve got some thrash classics of their own in the form of Bonded by Blood, Toxic Waltz and Strike of the Beast. Yup, they finished with that one at the Bierkeller back in 1989 too.
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