Anthrax - Persistence of Time
Tomorrow Anthrax’s Persistence Of Time turns 20. And 20 years later, this is still Anthrax’s masterpiece. It’s the record that transmutes their thread of silliness into character, lacing powerful thrash with dissonant chord voicings and fashioning massive, dynamic tunes (their longest songs ever, in fact) that build with consequence and drama. Joey Belladonna’s falsetto comes down a bit from its Steve Perry-esque heights to deliver trippy narratives somehow rooted in the concept of “time” but also spanning ‘Thrax faves like race relations, science fiction, and general holier-than-thou cultural condemnations that characterized thrash lyrics from this era.
Their heaviest and most thematically cogent outing ever, it exists in that magic pantheon along Seasons in the Abyss, Souls of Black, and Rust in Peace as the last artifacts of the golden era of American thrash, before its “midlife crisis”. As of 1990, Metallica hadn’t released The Black Album, grunge was still just a synonym for dirt, and the heavy hitters of thrash were still (relatively) young and at the top of their games.
Revisiting Persistence Of Time, I find it not only holds up but it wipes the floor with any metal released this year. Scott Ian’s guitar (apparently composed by drummer Charlie Benante) lacerates cleanly, and these are truly some of his Hall of Fame riffs, evoking the primal psychic imagery upon which this record depends. Frank Bello and Benante plow like a proper rhythm section with a charming identity independent of the guitars. Danny Spitz, never my favorite lead guitarist, paints an utterly unique and splattery impression with his unpolished solos. I notice that I appreciate his defiance of traditional lead guitar finesse now much more than I did at 14.
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I also notice that this LP is a long player, indeed. The first three tracks comprise an EP-worthy 20 minutes, only a third of the record’s length. I’m exhausted after one full listen. But at the same time, that’s the feeling I used to demand from albums. Slow-building churners like “Keep It in the Family” and “In My World” could probably shave a verse here or a riff variation there, but they would be weaker for it. There’s a lived-in feel to these sonic worlds, as opposed to an over-stayed welcome. Listening to Persistence Of Time on a recent long drive, I’m reminded of the days when I DID have a whole afternoon to spend listening to an Anthrax album.
While I understand this album better musically than I originally did, lyrically I have to say I’m still genuinely dumbfounded. Try parsing this verse from “Blood”:
Blood on your hands, blood in my eyes
Blood I can’t keep, blood circumscribes
Blood on your hands turns into blood in my eyesAnd with the blood I can’t keep
Our lives, blood circumscribes
Brother on, brother on, brother on, brothers in blood
The lyrics are not this knotted throughout, and I definitely understand the general thematic message conveyed, but Jeeessssusss: those lines challenge the mind’s cognitive capacity in a way that only Google Translate can rival. Yet this syntactic inelegance doesn’t hurt the album one bit. I’m pumping my fist in the air to nonsense like “Time don’t got nothing / To do with how high you can count”, and I’m actually getting a little choked up. Persistence Of Time has charm in spades. It harkens to a time when the Big Four weren’t so self-conscious, because they were in the zone. When you’re in the zone, you can get away with a lot, which in this case was 60 minutes of ineffable thrash that even your grandmother couldn’t mistake for anything else.
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PERSISTENCE OF TIME: THE OFFICIAL VIDEOS
“Got the Time”
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“In My World”
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“Belly of the Beast”
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