Path to Destruction

"...coming soon, the mushroom doom, to send us all to hell..."

This UK four-piece’s collective history follows a direction that’s not too scarce amongst past punk bands, or I should say metal bands that were once thrall to spiked hairdos, suspenders, and Doc Martens. Anihilated’s olden days travel back to around ’82, the group then enamored with a genre that spawned the likes of The Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and other radar-evading oi! acts, but eventually much of this shtick morphed into hardcore, then metalcore (is it me or does ‘crossover’ sound too dainty sometimes?), and finally bulldozed its way into molten thrash terrain. With ‘86’s Path of Destruction, Anihilated are in metalcore mode, actually more metal than core and a few shades past their earthier Speedwell demo. Evidently, they had seen the light.

To see where Created in Hate, the band’s up-coming blast, had evolved from, this ep is just about mandatory. The more creative concepts actualized on CIH are only half in bloom here and for the most part are weighed down by a one-dimensional anchor that drags across originality’s ocean floor. Possibly it’s because the fast parts are all full-frontal bruisers, each one fueled by the same double bass n’ snare rumble and coincides with the equally frequent hardcore-associated breakdowns in all four tracks. Nothing inventive, but still, muscle is flexed here, and in some exercises overpowers the stuff its younger sibling has brought to the gym.

Despite an acoustical intro that has “Fight Fire With Fire” smeared all over it, the strongest is opener “Innocent Victims” and its simplistically-issued rhythms that are all thrashed and bashed out by an energy level that can power a small town. “Anihilated” is the ep’s most diverse citizen that develops whiplash from the song’s uncharacteristically doomy start and finish, an entrance and finale that helps amplify the speed-zoned intersections and a lengthy stream of twin bass-rolled melody. “Shadows of Fear” and the latter portion of “Thunderflash” are sheared from the same sheet of metal “Innocent Victims” is from with the exception of “Thunderflash”’s oddly-timed first half where their early, pubescent punk-hungry roots continue to grow.

Simon “Si” Cobb is as much a true singer as Helen Keller was an air traffic controller, his tone dirty and bearded like the mass of the metalcore crowd that was roughing things up, kinda like those of Razor with more jaggedly hardcore framework.

And the drop down list is as follows:

Breaching boundaries – no.
A collectible item – yes.
Easy to find on lp – no.
Genre-spanning – yes.
Better than Created in Hate – well, different anyway.