Master - Slaves To Society
March 24 2008 at 07:54:05 AM
SPECKMANN!!! The master, unsung, living abroad and back on stage touring, writing, releasing music still potent as the politics at home grow more absurd. Or just more absurdly tolerated. Twenty years on with two albums seemingly impossible to live down, Master’s scathing 10th album sees the band at its strongest in years. Their state of mind spelled out immediately in the album’s cover, the meaning no deeper than that metalized rendering of citizen qua cum-receptacle at the feet of our Great Architects of Change. The disc’s eleven tracks regain a certain focus and clarity to heighten that aggression as Speckmann, guitarist Ales Nejezchleba and hammersmith Zdenel Pradlovsky continually pound out speed metal timed with machine gun rhythms backing bass guitar purring like a jet-black dragster and lyrics voiced raw and dripping, at each turn demonstrating that not all the old lions age so poorly. With songs battling an imbalance of recognition, hype and influence, the moniker answers peers and offspring together in signature twists delving briefly into pinch-groove riffs (“The Last Chapter”), accents of modern Death Metal (“The Room With Views”) and straight-forward thrash scored with blood and sand on the backs of the masses and those chosen to represent them. On these formulas they improve with proven simplicity, the production thinner than what's demanded by many of the genre's younger following, but with nothing softened in the delivery and paired together with the recent re-release of their first two LPs on CD, may at last see Master regain throne.
[Todd DePalma]
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