With The Atrocity Exhibition…Exhibit A (Nuclear Blast, 2007), Exodus continues a decades-long streak of spectacularly ugly album covers. (Scroll down here for my top 5 ugliest ones.) Like on 2004’s Tempo of the Damned, Nuclear Blast has covered up the actual artwork (pictured here) with a more tasteful slipcase. It’s almost comforting how consistently bad Exodus’ artwork is.
Riot ActThe Garden of Bleeding
This actually factors into the gestalt of Exodus. The recurring question these days is if the band deserves the name, since only one original member, Gary Holt, remains. Heathen’s Lee Altus replaced Rick Hunolt in 2005 to good effect. Bassist Jack Gibson has been onboard for some time, and original drummer Tom Hunting is back. I was on the fence about new vocalist Rob Dukes on 2005’s Shovel Headed Kill Machine, but this record has made up my mind: his faceless yell is neither positive nor negative.
The lineup almost doesn’t matter, though, as Holt drives Exodus. Quite simply, he’s a big, bad riffing machine. He’s also writing incredibly long, exciting epics; four tracks top eight minutes in length, and the title track weighs in at 10:32. Holt whips out godlike riff after godlike riff, with no end in sight. He’s out-riffing his ’80s colleagues – Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer – but perhaps Testament can challenge him this year.
Except for one song, Holt wrote all the lyrics. In recent years, he’s matured towards more topical themes, namely anti-Christianity and anti-war. Dukes’ anti-Islam contribution, “Children of a Worthless God,” is perhaps dissonant (and reminiscent of Juan Urteaga’s borderline racism in Vile), but could be reconciled with Holt’s anti-religion stance. A nod to lighter times, though, comes in a hidden track, a hilarious bluegrass version of “Bonded by Blood.”
Andy Sneap delivers his usual technically flawless but overly compressed audio pancake. Tom Hunting’s personality has been click-tracked away, but this record is first and foremost about Holt. Exhibit A isn’t the best post-comeback Exodus record (that would be Tempo of the Damned), but it blows away every “retro thrash” trendhopper I’ve heard. Bring on Exhibit B!
Exhibit A is available at CM Distro, Relapse, and The End.
Related posts:
Having seen the band live a couple of weeks ago, I can say that Hunting’s drumming live was fucking fantastic. You can claim his personality was “click tracked away” all you want, but the truth of the matter is that the man IS a click track!
I doubt any drummer would want to be called a click track! Although you did call a click track “fucking fantastic”…I guess Godflesh’s drum machine was pretty fucking fantastic.
I still think Gary Holt should’ve just started a new band. Sure, it would’ve been constantly compared to Exodus anyway, but… I don’t know, for some reason – and I like this record and pretty much everything Exodus has ever done for the most part – it just doesn’t totally feel like Exodus to me anymore. The riffs still sound like Exodus, and Rob Dukes – to me – totally sounds like he’s going for a Baloff via Souza thing, but… the lineup changes weren’t as organic as they were for other bands that have shifted form so much over the decades, you know? It just seems a little strange somehow.
I totally know what you mean. I think a big part of it is when they started using Andy Sneap to produce. He really has a definite sound that he imposes on bands. Maybe if Exodus v.2.0 used someone less obviously modern-sounding, then they would sound more like v.1.0.