Nuclear Assault - Handle with Care

Nuclear Assault’s Handle with Care turns 20 today, according to metal-archives.com. Back in the day, I would stare longingly at its longbox in record stores. I never pulled the trigger, though. Metallica and Megadeth were higher priorities. However, I now have a strange predilection for ’80s thrash sung by air raid sirens like Steve “Zetro” Souza and Katon De Pena. John Connelly is part of this “pantheon,” though even I can’t handle his voice for long periods of time.

Still, it’s a bracing artifact from another era. No band embodied the ’80s thrash stereotype of Ed Repka artwork and nuclear holocaust lyrics more than Nuclear Assault. Their video for “Critical Mass” is amusingly literal, from printing the lyrics at the bottom of the frame to inserting pictures of oil spills and dying forests right when the lyrics mention those things. To add to the ’80s-ness, Riki Rachtman introduces this video on the original Headbangers Ball, and Jessica Hahn makes a non sequitur appearance.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/aWFhlYfqj4Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0

Both videos Nuclear Assault made for Handle with Care passed by me at the time. If I had seen either one, I probably would have bought that longbox. “Trail of Tears” (unsurprisingly, MTV misspells the title) is classic ’80s metal video material, from the fade edits to the theme of the oppressed young metalhead. (See Megadeth’s “Peace Sells” or any number of MTV videos about kids rebelling against parents. Metal was adolescent and more vulnerable then. Now metal is grown up and its videos have more swagger.) Thematically and geographically (dead-end lives in bombed-out New York), this video recalls the ones Skid Row made for their first album (“18 and Life,” “Youth Gone Wild,” “I Remember You,”), which came out the same year. Of course, the music is different, but the line between glam and real metal in the ’80s was finer than most poser-killers would admit.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/313QBXLXaqg&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0