#nithe

Thrash metal, on the other hand, doesn’t change much, and its faithful listeners seem to like it that way. Speed, snarl and stringwork suggesting the pleasures of sweat-soaked spandex: these are the subgenre’s verities. “Chains of the Abyss,” the first track Nithe hits you with on Funeral Death, provides the speed and snarl in impressive degrees of intensity. The textures just about justify the “death” in the abovementioned phrase, but really, the song isn’t so far from the antics of SOD—though the dudes in Nithe seem to mean it a bit more seriously. Even more satisfying are the shouts of “Death! Death! Death! Death! Death!” in (yep) “Funeral Death.” Things get fairly caustic in the second half of that song, which has a committed sense of sonic violence.

It may be that “thrash metal” carries with it a whiff of compromise, given the term’s association with Metallica and Big 4-period stadium spaces. Death and black metal bands have played massive arenas and festivals, as well, but those subgenre tags retain crucial semantic links to the metal underground and its gatekeepers. Funeral Death is an underground affair (demo style, on a label the slogan of which is “Only true music is real”—chew on that for a sec), and it’s likely the dudes in Nithe would rather be condemned to decades listening to Van Halen’s 1984 than don spandex leggings. But drop into “Primordial Ooze (Mother of Woe)” around the 35th second and tell this reviewer what you hear. It’s the mid-1980s all over again. Sounds good, on any number of levels.