Review: Overkill – The Electric Age
Apr 16
Overkill – The Electric Age
Review
Overkill is one of those 80’s era thrash bands that seemed to never consider stopping or even slowing down as a career option. Ever. And with modern releases like Electirc Age, that’s definitely not a bad thing by any stretch. For a band going on 32 years now, it’s good to see the boys from Jersey putting out yet another solid release, especially one that shows them no worse for wear after sixteen studio albums.
While 2010’s Ironbound album saw the thrashers spread some musical wings, broadening songs with near progressive structures and chilled out wanderings, The Electric Age assumes the more straight-to-the-throat attack that Overkill has always had a knack for. The album opens up with two songs that do well to illustrate this, Come And Get It and Electric Rattlesnake. The former does a good job of being a trademark Overkill song and will probably be a new staple of live shows with its fast, driving tempo and classic crew shouted chorus. Electric Rattlesnake keeps up the pace, featuring some of the cool sounding left to right panned vocals that Bobby ‘Blitz’ has been known to throw into the mix in recent years, and even has a good change-up in the way of a mid-song breakdown lead by D. D. Verni on bass, like what we saw alot of on Ironbound. It is also worth noting that these two stand-outs of the album work well to demonstrate that being 52 years of age has done little to dampen Blitz’s trademark snarls and shrieks, and they sound just as good as ever with the added grizzled qualities of a thrasher who’s been around the block.
Other songs on the album mix it up well enough to keep it flowing, such as down tempo songs like Black Daze giving the listener a near-breather with its marching, fist pumping chorus that is just begging to be chanted along with. Even the filler songs like 21st Century Man and Wish You Were Dead provide a good flow to the album in keeping up the energy that is the namesake of the album itself before closing the effort off with All Over But The Shouting and Good Night, two songs that feel as much like pure Overkill songs as anything, with their oh-so-evil and ominously built up bridges and catchy, sing along choruses.
While on the whole, The Electric Age does not provide a true stand-out release, in terms of the group’s early most efforts, it does a fantastic job of of cementing the band as a tried and true thrash mob whom you can always count on for a solid head banger. They have always stuck to their guns, which is to be respected, but if their newest album has a bottom line, it is simply this: you can always count on Overkill to release an Overkill album.
7/10
