Horror Business Part Two: The Viet Nam Aesthetic

The early 1970s were a fertile ground for horror films in America. 1974 in particular was a real watershed year; not only did we get Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (my nomination for the title of “first American slasher movie,” predating John Carpenter’s Halloween by four years), but audiences were also treated to what might still be the scariest movie of all time: Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Loosely inspired by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein – the same case that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still holds up because it feels so real. Featuring no-name actors, shot out in the middle of nowhere; you really feel like you could be watching someone’s last moments. The film features almost no onscreen bloodshed, but it was so effective that even the trailer was alleged to cause theater walkouts.

Texas Chainsaw wasn’t the first gritty, exploitative horror movie of the 1970s, though. It came hot on the heels of Wes Craven’s instantly infamous low-budget shocker, 1972’s Last House on the Left. Craven based his directorial debut on The Virgin Spring, a film by renowned Swedish director Ingmar Bergman – which was itself adapted from a medieval folk ballad, in what might be the most convoluted horror movie family tree of all time. The story of two parents avenging the rape and murder of their daughters by a roving pack of maniacs was, for its time, unprecedented in its graphic depiction of violence. Wes Craven has explained numerous times the role the Viet Nam War played in his conception of the movie:

“It […] was the era of Vietnam. And not to put too fine a point on it, I very much was influenced—and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock—for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war. Recently shot 16mm footage was coming back and appearing on television immediately, so there was little censorship of what you saw, and it was just appalling.” (1)

Craven’s film featured the infamous advertising tagline, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating – it's only a movie.” The unsettling implication being that you couldn’t do the same with news footage of American soldiers being killed.

From this point forwards, Viet Nam pervaded the horror films of the 1970s and early ‘80s. Tom Savini, the famous make-up artist who crafted the gore effects for Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, and Maniac (among many others) got his start as a combat photographer in Viet Nam – leading to the extremely disquieting possibility that some of the painstakingly crafted corpses in those films are based on real corpses Savini encountered on duty. The ‘Living Dead’ of George Romero’s zombie movies can be seen as a metaphor for damaged troops returning home (although the Living Dead can be used as metaphors for basically anything – we’ll get into that later). And the deranged hitchhiker who kick-starts the action in Texas Chainsaw – in addition to bringing up fears of economic instability with his discussion of being laid off from the slaughterhouse – does have something of a brain-damaged veteran vibe to him (this implication would be made explicit in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two, where the hitchhiker was replaced with ‘Chop-Top,’ a literal brain-damaged Viet Nam vet with a metal plate in his head). Beyond the specific allusions, though, the emerging Viet Nam aesthetic meant not just more violence, but more of a personal and emotional toll to go along with that violence.

As horror moved further into the 1980s, the nasty subgenre of exploitation horror was gradually replaced by the equally exploitative, but overall more sanitized, slasher film. Sometime in the early years of the 2000s, though, some nasty, cruel, brutish and short horror movies started to sneak back in under the radar. Just as 1974 is arguably the most pivotal year in ‘70s horror, 2003 was the start of a new wave of 21st century horror. In the space of one year, horror fans got the deliriously gory French import High Tension, Eli Roth’s body-horror debut Cabin Fever, and Rob Zombie’s over-the-top serial killer flick House of 1000 Corpses. With their de-glamorized violence, desaturated color palates, and low-budgets, all three of these films evidenced a clear 1970s aesthetic influence. House of 1000 Corpses in particular is set in Texas in 1974, the same year the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released – and it shamelessly lifts so much from that movie’s plot and style that it could practically be considered a remake (even going so far as to cast the great Bill Mosely - the aforementioned 'Chop Top' from TCM 2 - as one of the lead villains; the sequel, The Devil’s Rejects, took a more original approach, and was consequently one of the best horror films of the decade). Just as in the 1970s, these films were clearly the start of a new trend. Later that year, there was the gruesome hillbilly slasher Wrong Turn, and in October, a pretty crappy remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The trend wouldn’t stop there, though, and where it led was even more culturally disturbing.

The double whammy of James Wan’s suspense-thriller Saw and Eli Roth’s extremely violent sophomore effort Hostel brought graphic scenes of torture to the forefront. These films attracted significant controversy - which, judging by Hostel’s provocative advertising campaign, was exactly what they intended - but they also raked in cash. Saw was made on a budget of just over one million dollars, yet it raked in over 100 million in combined theater and DVD dollars. And, like any low-budget horror flick worth its weight, it was followed by a string of increasingly terrible sequels (not that the original was particularly good in the first place, but the series rapidly descended from wild improbability into outright lunacy). Now, any movie with a plot designed to support a string of painful torture scenes has an intrinsically limited audience; the fact that the films are terrible either lessens or increases their chances of success depending on your opinion of the average theater-goer. So why did these films take off so incredibly?

For me, it once again comes back to the culture that produced them. Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, one of the first of this new-wave of exploitation horror, came out on April 11th of 2003, less than 30 days after the US invaded Iraq. The movie, of course, had been in production long before that – in fact, it was all but completed three years prior, but was delayed due to fights with the MPAA ratings board over its graphic violence. The delay in its release ended up with the result that it came out just as public consciousness of a new war was reaching its fever pitch. If you want to take this line of thought even further, you can look at the specific wave of the so-called “torture porn” subgenre. Saw, the first of this particular trend, was widely released in October of 2004. Torture, too, was fresh in the American mindset: the news of the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib broke in late April of that same year. The post-Iraq American consciousness, much like the post-Viet Nam American consciousness, was in exactly the right place and time to foster a new, disturbing trend in horror.

It seemed as though 2007 would’ve been the perfect time for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to unleash their ambitious Grindhouse project on the bloodthirsty public. Grindhouse was a double-feature, 3-hour long homage to the sleazy, violent horror movies that Rodriguez, Tarantino, and many of the new decade’s horror filmmakers grew up watching. Robert Rodriguez’ half, Planet Terror, even featured one of the most knowing winks to the ‘70s style of exploitation film I’ve yet encountered: late in the film, Bruce Willis’ character reveals that his platoon was dosed with some kind of biological chemical shortly after they killed Osama Bin Laden on a mission in Afghanistan – were the film made in the ‘70s, you could easily see those details substituted for Agent Orange, Ho Chi Minh, and Viet Nam. A mix of zombie flick and slasher movie featuring guest trailers directed by guys like Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, overflowing with gore and stylish camerawork, it seemed that Grindhouse could do no wrong.

Until the box office returns came back, that is. Grindhouse had an 11.5 million dollar opening weekend, not even making back a quarter of its 53 million dollar budget. Two months later, Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II would similarly bomb at the box office, with an opening weekend of 8.2 million, compared to the 19 million dollar opening weekend of the first installment – a number that Hostel: Part II would fail to gross in its entire theatrical run. The bubble, it seemed, had burst for the new wave of exploitation.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is market saturation. If you flood the market with something to capitalize on a new trend, people will inevitably get sick of it. This is especially true with regards to the horror film, and specifically a subgenre of horror that relies so heavily on shock. If you see enough rote, by-the-numbers movies with people getting horribly mutilated, you almost immediately start to lose the key factor that made such films interesting in the first place: the element of danger. If you’re the first to come up with this violent new idea of gritty, downbeat torture flicks, you might seem like a provocative, edgy auteur. If you’re the fifteenth, though, you just seem like a businessman out for a quick buck. Which might be scary, but not in the way you intended.

Not that the trend is over-and-done-with. Last year saw a remake of Last House on the Left, and the Saw movies continue to get churned out on an annual basis. But to me, it seems clear that the exploitative torture genre is going through exactly what it subjects its characters to: a slow death.

Coming Up Next: An analysis of the decade in slasher films, and the dark mirror they hold up to the U.S. Economy - No, really - in Slashing the Budget.

(1 - Sourced from Wes Craven interview at http://www.avclub.com/articles/wes-craven,24869/)
(Poster images obtained via http://www.wikipedia.org)

Horror Business Part One: The Outsider

When discussing the idea of Genre in fiction, Horror could be called the black sheep of the family – or, perhaps more appropriately, the creepy little kid that you don’t want to turn your back on. The very idea of the horror story – a piece of fiction designed to elicit fear, terror, and other altogether unpleasant emotions – has always been a bit of a tough sell. With a rare few exceptions, you don’t see horror novels climbing the bestseller lists (unless they’re by Steven King) and you don’t see horror movies grabbing Oscars (unless its Silence of the Lambs). Good horror should be distressing on a very basic level. Horror has always been the outsider’s genre, and most people simply don’t want to hear about it. And when a horror story is put on film, with all the grisly details coming to life on celluloid, it becomes that much more powerful.

For these reasons, the horror film often comes under a lot of scrutiny. This can be seen a lot in the period from the late ‘70s to the mid ‘80s, from Siskel and Ebert’s furious televised tirade against the Friday the 13^th series to the utterly hilarious parent-teacher protests of the infamous Santa slasher, Silent Night, Deadly Night. But, as with any form of art, telling people they shouldn’t see it is just going to make them want to even more, and it’s often the horror films with the least semblance of moral value that are able to take over the box offices.

All of this taken together has led me to the belief that no genre in film can tell you more about the culture producing it than the horror movie. Through its dark, subversive nature, the horror film reveals things that other genres can’t – or won’t – acknowledge. If Drama is classical and Romantic-Comedy is pop, Horror is punk-fucking-rock – and like punk rock, though it may attract protest and condemnation from many, it exposes some truths that are hard to deny.

In this series, I’ll be looking at the relation between the Horror film and society with a specific focus on the past ten years. All narrative genres have a tendency to be cyclical though, so I’ll also be taking a look at how the horror films of the 21^st century mirror what came before.

In the next installment, I’ll be taking a look at the resurgence of the 1970s exploitation style of horror filmmaking, or what I like to call The Viet Nam Aesthetic.

Missing the Target: John Woo's Hard Target

It’s a strange axiom within film that bad movies are often far more enjoyable by good movies. I could cite the fact that I’ve seen classics like The Godfather and Casablanca once apiece, but I’ve seen Robot Monster at least a dozen times (That’s the one with the gorilla in the diving helmet. No, I'm not going to elaborate on that). Granted, watching truly terrible movies is not for amateurs. It’s been clinically proven as a link to alcoholism – and I’d argue it causes marijuana use too, but that’s a bit of a ‘chickens-and-eggs’ scenario. So you can be sure I took it very seriously when I went to my local library to seek out the worst movie I could find – on VHS, mind you, the way the true bad movie professionals do it. But, since picking on Batman and Robin is like picking on the crippled kid in gym class, I settled for the second worst movie I could find: John Woo’s Hard Target. I followed proper bad movie procedure: I called some friends, had a few drinks, and got myself ready. And by about five minutes in, I knew I’d done good.

The movie opens with a bunch of bad guys led by Lance Henriksen chasing down an unspecified victim through the back alleys of New Orleans. I was glad to see Henriksen in this one; he’s one of those really good actors who just keeps winding up in really bad movies. I’m not sure how you go from roles in Dog Day Afternoon, Aliens, and Near Dark to direct-to-video crap like Alone in the Dark II and Screamers: The Hunting, but hey, that’s Hollywood for you. Anyway, it turns out Lance and his cronies are one of those shady action-movie groups of wealthy tycoons that get together to hunt the deadliest prey of all – MAN! Yes, this is yet another adaptation of the classic Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” although as far as dead horses go, this one’s been beaten so often that you’d probably have to check its dental records to find that out. I also feel like these so-called ‘big game hunters’ kind of missed the point. I mean, there’s at least a dozen of them with motorcycles, machine guns, crossbows, and bazookas chasing after one unarmed homeless guy. Kinda takes the thrill out of the hunt, don’t you think. “If he gets to the river, he’s won. We cannot allow that to happen,” Lance helpfully explains. Really though, if he makes it to the river, they’re all gonna look like a bunch of fucking amateurs.

We go from the hunt to another bad movie veteran, Yancy Butler, arriving in New Orleans to try and track down her missing father. And I have to say, her performance is impressive in that I’ve never seen someone appear on screen for so much of a movie without ever appearing to act. She just sort of has that watching-paint-dry face in every situation. It’s like someone tried to teach a robot how to act and gave up halfway through. Her search leads her to Mr. Van Damme himself, introduced via a slow-motion close-up on the back of his glorious mullet. Now, one of my favorite things about Van Damme movies – and, trust me, I have a lot of favorite things about them – is that the filmmakers always try and come up with some background to explain his accent. But it’s never, ever the right one. Here, the muscles from Brussels plays Chance Boudreaux. Really, that’s his name. Trouble is, he doesn’t even try to sound Cajun whatsoever. It’s even worse than when he tried to play a French-Canadian in Sudden Death. So JCVD and whatshername decide to investigate the missing person’s case together and stumble upon… y’know, I’m just gonna stop right there. Nobody really cares about the plot to this, do they? We just want to see Van Damme kick some people in the face.

And oh boy, do we ever see him kick some people in the face. Another great thing about JCVD movies is that, since he built his career on kicking people really hard, all the fight scenes involve people attacking him in the most awkward, ungainly positions to leave themselves open for a face kick. I mean, when Van Damme can kick a guy off a speeding motorcycle, it doesn’t make him look badass, it just makes the biker look retarded. And since this is also a John Woo movie, the viewer gets to ponder such questions as: “Is it really necessary to kick somebody in the face after you’ve shot them five times?”

On that note, I’d like to observe a moment of silence for John Woo’s career. I don’t know if his IQ just dropped sharply once he left Hong Kong, but it’s simply stunning that he made this just one year after making one of the greatest action movies of all time, Hard Boiled. There are still plenty of his little trademarks, such as shitloads of slow motion, improbably placed doves flying everywhere, and lots of ‘seeing-things-in-reflections-of-other-things,’ but there’s not really much in the way of actual directing. Does America just have some sort of dumbening field around it or what?

Anyway, about halfway through, my notes on the movie devolved into a simple catalogue of all the ridiculous shit that was happening. This is a movie where Jean Claude Van Damme punches a poisonous snake unconscious, then hangs it from a tree as a booby trap so it can bite someone in the face. This is a movie where Jean Claude Van Damme kicks a can of gasoline at someone, then shoots the can in mid-air, causing them to burst into flames – when he could have just shot him. This is a movie where people dive face-first through plate glass windows unscathed, everything bursts into flames when shot, and Ted Raimi shows up for a cameo (and when you even know who Ted Raimi is, you know you’ve seen too many bad movies). By the end of this movie’s six hours – I mean ninety minutes – I was frantically searching the back of the box for some kind of crisis hotline. Someone I could call and ask “how does the bad guy know that the train went by two and a half hours ago just by looking at a muddy footprint?” I guess I got what I paid for, though (it was free). Now I can show myself in front of fellow bad movie connoisseurs with pride in my heart and say, “Why yes, I have seen a movie where Wilford Brimley rides a horse away from an explosion wielding a bow-and-arrow.”

Did I mention Wilford Brimley’s in it?

Wilford Brimley’s in it.



(Poster image obtained via http://wikipedia.org. Brimley image obtained via http://www.edhumphries.com)

Armed Forces.

When I first saw the front page of the Boston Metro on Friday, November 6, my blood ran cold. Now, I had heard that expression before, but I had thought it hyperbole until it happened to me. There had been a shooting spree at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, the same base where my best friend Harry Dery was stationed. That was when I felt the chill, that gravel-in-your-guts horror that makes everything else insignificant. I spent the rest of my hour-long commute to school frantically trying to call and text Harry to find out if he was okay, but I couldn’t get a hold of him. I knew that Fort Hood was a big place, and that the odds were slim of Harry being one of the 13 dead, or even one of the 30 wounded. I also knew the horrible detail that the shooting had taken place at a processing center where troops receive medical treatment before going overseas, and since Harry wasn’t scheduled to go overseas any time soon, that also helped his chances. I knew these things, but they didn’t help. I was still gripped with the irrational terror of a horrible situation.

Eventually, I got to a computer on campus and saw a note from his sister on his Facebook page saying she was glad to hear he was okay (proof that Facebook is good for something other than tagging embarrassing pictures of your drunk friends). Later still I received a text message from Harry simply stating “Yea I’m good bro.” I could finally relax. But the horror wouldn’t go away.

I recall thinking later that day that I hadn’t been so horrified by a news item since the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India. It was then I realized that, while it felt like a long time, those attacks happened less than a year ago. Why do these things happen? What, exactly, is wrong with the world? The fact that this happened so close to Veteran’s day seems like the punchline to a sick joke that nobody will laugh at.

People will theorize, of course. Bob Herbert of the New York Times offered an article entitled “Stress Beyond Belief” that reads as passionate, if misguided. Herbert is just one of the many that have drawn connections between shooter Nidal Malik Hasan’s actions and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something my parents who grew up during the Viet Nam war still refer to as ‘Shell Shock.’ Now, certainly PTSD is an extremely serious topic, as is the treatment soldiers may or may not receive for it. I am glad that more attention is being paid to the subject. But drawing this tenuous thread between PTSD and Hasan, and going so far as to imply that it’s the reason for Hasan’s rampage, seems a bit irresponsible. What Herbert and so many other journalists are failing to acknowledge is that Hasan had yet to do a tour of duty overseas. He was scheduled to go on his first deployment – a tour of Afghanistan – in the coming months. When discussing the event in my Criminology class that Friday morning, a fellow student asked “Is there such a thing as Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder?” It’s not a bad question.

So we can’t blame PTSD for Hasan’s actions. Hell, according to ABC News, Hasan “completed a fellowship in Disaster and Preventive Psychiatry at the Center for Traumatic Stress.” So should we blame those who treat PTSD for his shooting spree? Of course not. In the face of a tragedy like this, it can be hard for the disturbed public to accept that they’re looking for solutions where there are none to be found. Just like the shootings at Columbine or the Oklahoma city bombing, people will try to single out one factor as a cause, be it “dangerous” literature, “dangerous” music, or, in what’s already showing itself to be the case, a “dangerous” religion. It’s hard to accept and impossible to explain, but sometimes people just snap. The best we can do is try and gain a better, more scrutinizing knowledge of events as they unfold. And we can truly respect the soldiers in our armed forces, not just as a passing trend that fades with the memory of tragedy, but as an ongoing understanding that transcends mere patriotism into a true compassion for our fellow man.

-Michael James Roberson

The Roberson Record Roundup: Mike’s Top Five Albums of 2009

In the past ten months, 2009 has shown itself to be a pretty outstanding year for music. And while I know there’s still two months left to go in the year, if Pitchfork.com can do a list of the best albums of the decade in October, I can do a list of the best albums of the year in November.

I should take this moment to acknowledge that there are a few 2009 albums I haven’t yet heard that could’ve possibly made this list: Agorapocalypse by Agoraphobic Nosebleed, The Great Misdirect by Between the Buried and Me, Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City by Ghostface Killah, Desperate Living by HORSE the band, and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 by Raekwon. I’ll also use this space to give out some honorable mentions to the records that didn’t quite crack the top five: Crack the Skye by Mastodon, Blackout 2 by Method Man & Redman, The Sound The Speed The Light by Mission of Burma, Coaster by NOFX, and Common Existence by Thursday.

5. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Animal Collective’s unique blend of jangly acoustic guitars and thundering, bass-heavy electronic beats has made them a real standout act in the post-2000 indie music scene. On this album, though, they’ve really outdone themselves. Merriweather Post Pavilion is one of those wonderful few albums that manages to be the most accessible effort by the band to date without sacrificing any of their artistic integrity. The throat-shredding screams and howls of albums like Feels and Strawberry Jam have been replaced with elegant, Beach Boys-style vocal harmonies. There’s still some of the band’s past brand of psychadelia on the introductory drone “In the Flowers” and the bizarrely catchy “Lion in a Coma”, but on tracks like the bouncy lead single “My Girls” and the epic ready-made for the rave set finish “Brothersport,” you can hear the sound of a band that’s found a whole new sonic territory to play around in. Animal Collective has revitalized themselves with this one, and potentially opened themselves up to a whole new audience.

4. DOOM – Born Like This

On his landmark 2004 Madvillain project with DJ Madlib, MF Doom reminded us to “Just remember all caps when you spell the man name.” Apparently, he took his own advice, because the mysterious rapper has dropped the ‘MF’ from his name in favor of the simple DOOM (this being, by my count, the seventh name change he’s undergone in his career). From the beginning of Born Like This’ lead track, “Gazillion Ear”, though, fans can be sure that this is the same old Doom as before, dropping gravelly-voiced, stream-of-consciousness references to Ernest Goes to Camp and the Large Hadron Collider in the same breath. Breaking away from his past two albums which featured production by Madlib and Dangermouse, respectively, DOOM does most of the beats here himself (although there are a few by Madlib and the late great J Dilla), and shows that he’s just as much of a force to be reckoned with in the studio as he is on the mic. And, in keeping with past albums, DOOM gives some of his best beats to the guest artists. Raekwon in particular walks away with one of the best tracks on the album in “Yessir”, a breakneck two-minute solo spot featuring one of the most hypnotically intense beats DOOM’s ever written. And then there’s “Cellz”, the stark, heavy centerpiece of the album, featuring probably the last guest spot I ever expected to hear on a hip-hop album: a two-minute vocal sample of deceased California beat poet Charles Bukowski. After four long years of waiting, hip-hop’s modernist master is back, and he’s put out one of the standout albums of his career.

3. The Thermals – Now We Can See

“I only felt sane when I was afraid,” shouts singer Hutch Harris on Portland, Oregon punk rockers The Thermals' fourth album, Now We Can See. When he was afraid was probably on their last album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, their biblically terrifying 2006 indictment of the Bush presidency (still my contender for punk rock album of the decade). Now We Can See may lack the sheer vitriol of that album, but it still features all the complex lyricism and catchy guitar hooks that Thermals fans have come to expect. They might be taken aback at first, though: this is probably the most laid back, radio-friendly album the band has yet recorded. Upon further listens though, new complexities open up both musically and thematically, such as the album’s ever-present lyrical themes of death and the afterlife (evidenced in the triptych of songs “When I Died,” “When We Were Alive,” and “When I Was Afraid”) and the new types of songwriting and production the band explores (“At The Bottom of the Sea” sounds unlike anything they’ve recorded prior). This is the definition of an album that rewards upon repeat listens, and with songs as catchy as the sing-a-long title track, repeat listens are absolutely guaranteed.

2. Converge – Axe to Fall

The most impressive thing about local hardcore band Converge is their remarkable consistency. Since their debut Petitioning the Empty Sky in 1998, these guys have yet to release an album that was less than terrific, and even if that first record was also their last, they’d probably still be legends within their genre. It should go without saying then that their new album Axe to Fall is just as terrific as anything they’ve put out in the past ten years and well worth the four year wait from 2005’s No Heroes. The new twist here is that the album features a veritable who’s-who of notable metal and hardcore musicians as guest artists, including members of Hatebreed, 108, Cave In, Neurosis, and Genghis Tron, among others. There’s more collaboration within the band as well, with guitarist Kurt Ballou showing off his impressive vocals in “Worms Will Feed/Rats Will Feast,” maybe the best slow/heavy song the band has written to date. The overall effect is that this is probably the most metal-sounding album Converge has ever recorded. Almost every song features a lightspeed guitar solo, blindingly fast double-bass drums, or both. And, as always, Converge are masters of pacing within the album format, kicking it into high gear at the beginning with the headbanging trio of “Dark Horse,” “Reap What You Sow,” and “Axe to Fall” before bringing it back down at the end with the shockingly slow, soft collaborative jam pieces “Cruel Bloom” and “Wretched World.” Converge has definitely still got it, and they remain standouts in both the hardcore and metal scenes.

1. Doomriders – Darkness Come Alive

As a massive Converge fan, I was convinced from the beginning of the year that their new album would be the best of the year. What I couldn’t count on was being blindsided by a Converge side-project. Converge bassist Nate Newton takes on guitar and lead vocals for Doomriders’ second album, Darkness Come Alive. There’s no sophomore slump here. Instead, the leap in musicality from their first album, Black Thunder, is a musical evolution comparable to the jump Metallica made between Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning. Tracks like “Heavy Lies the Crown” and “Come Alive” are the kind of songs that truly deserve being called “anthemic,” with utterly metal guitar harmonies and vocals delivered in Newton’s best Glenn Danzig howl. Plus, there are still tracks that call back to the band’s hardcore background, such as the punishing two-minute long “Knife Wound” or the fantastic closing track “Rotter.” If they can get out from under Converge’s shadow – and they deserve to – Doomriders are poised to become the Misfits or even the Iron Maiden of this generation.