CD Review: World Fire Brigade - Spreading My Wings

CD Review: World Fire Brigade - Spreading My Wings

Entertainment One

All Access Review: A-

World Fire Brigade - Spreading My Wings 2012

World Fire Brigade is certainly not low on Fuel. This trio of post-grunge renegades counts Fuel front man Brett Scallions, Smile Empty Soul lead singer/guitarist Sean Danielsen, and Eddie Wohl – best known as a producer/mixer for both bands, as well as Anthrax – among its members. And then, adding more Fuel to the fire, there’s Ken Schalk, Fuel’s current drummer, working in the trenches doing all the percussive dirty work for World Fire Brigade. On Spreading My Wings, their debut LP, these fire bugs have ignited a barely contained burn of riff-hungry, commercially accessible hard rock set ablaze with heated passion and intense emotions. They have no intention of putting out the blaze.

Decidedly heavier and more metallic than Fuel, World Fire Brigade was originally conceived as a sort of songwriting collective established to create material for other artists. In the end, they just couldn’t bring themselves to give away the product of their sweat and toil. No, this stuff, caught in the grip of hooks that simply don’t let go, was too good to pawn off on someone else.

Unexpectedly bracing, Spreading My Wings is a grinding, explosive work order that World Fire Brigade carries out with surprising vigor and guitars stuck in overdrive, especially on the gnarled, growling “Don’t Walk Away” and the slamming, groove-oriented serpents “All My Demands” and “Never Saw the Wall” – all of them red-hot furnaces of ferocious, prison-riot riffs and sizzling, screaming guitar leads, possibly inspired by the appearances of Anthrax’s Rob Caggiano and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready. More radio-friendly, “All You Know,” “Weight of the World,” and the title track all go through their periods of almost thrash-like intensity and rage, but when they dissipate and the vast, big-sky choruses that made Fuel famous come into view, plumes of melody fan out across the great expanse and take your breath away, as they do in “Shell of Me.”

Falling into predictable patterns, World Fire Brigade simply can’t help itself when it arrives at those choruses. They have to be vast and emit retina-scorching UV rays, the soaring vocals must be laid out on blankets of swaying, sustained guitar chords lightly fried with distortion, and they have to arrive right on time, as if they have to stick to a tight schedule. A welcome anomaly is “Fly,” a tender, delicately sketched acoustic ballad that goes by quickly, but is terribly affecting. So are the introspective lyrics of Spreading My Wings, which seek to leach the toxins of hurt, betrayal, anger and world-weary resignation from World Fire Brigade’s body and spirit. The cleansing starts now.

- Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Anthrax "Worship Music"

CD Review: Anthrax "Worship Music"
Megaforce Records
All Access Review:  A

A dark, evil hymnal for the damned, Anthrax’s Worship Music is a gloriously aggressive monstrosity, frightening in its intensity and yet somehow also melodically captivating. Already anointed by metal’s cognoscenti as one of the New York City bashers’ greatest works, the record is Anthrax’s first with singer Joey Belladonna since 1990’s Persistence of Time, and the long-awaited reunion, brokered for the recent earth-conquering Big 4 tour with Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth, has birthed a thrash-metal masterpiece, a teeth-gnashing symphony of sonic mayhem and beautiful violence that never takes a smoke break.

More than that, however, Worship Music is classic Anthrax. It doesn’t suffer from an identity crisis. Thirty years into a career built on uncompromising, brutal music, Anthrax has stayed true to itself, despite numerous vocalists and other personnel changes. Even when they stretch out a bit, like in the soul-searching, cavernous chorus “The Giant,” where Belladona passionately wails, “Caught between the lines of right and wrong yeah/Caught between the things that I don’t know,” Anthrax stamps its mark on the track with a heavy, furious cyclone of serrated guitars, pounding rhythms and a heaving bridge as clear proof that they’re as grounded and comfortable in their own skin as any metal band that’s ever lived.

To put it another way, Anthrax is, indeed, the devil you know, and the sprawling Worship Music won’t leave anybody wondering if Scott Ian, Charlie Benante, Frank Bello, Rob Caggiano and, of course, Belladonna, have traded in their aggressive, high-velocity riffage, searing guitar solos, hammering drums and quaking, blinding bass lines – not to mention Belladonna’s primal, raging vocal waging piercing through the magnificent din – for a bag of magic beans and glitzy, pop-music stardom. After the haunting instrumental intro “Worship,” Anthrax ignites all-out war in “Earth on Hell,” a hornets’ nest of activity and energy that attacks the senses from every angle. “The Devil You Know” follows, and its momentum is unstoppable. A runaway semi of sound with an instantly memorable chorus (“Gotta go with the devil you know!”) and an impossibly heavy groove, “The Devil You Know” has secured its place among Anthrax’s most revered aural assaults. And speaking of aural assaults, the unrelenting “Fight ‘Em ‘Til You Can” – a song about fending off a zombie apocalypse – is a street fight of Benante’s vicious, martial-arts-style drumming, sharp guitar stabs and Belladonna’s bare-knuckled vocals.

Heavier still is the militaristic stomp of “I’m Alive,” with its thick, crushing riffs and Belladonna delivering the poisonous lyric “heaven lives in every gun” with gut-level urgency and theatrics, while the churning epic “In the End” rises slowly and majestically like a rogue wave that’s about to crash down on a defenseless fishing trawler. Everything on Worship Music boggles the senses. It’s war-like, with a little bit of dark, oaken cello and the occasional church bell for atmosphere. Tempos shift on a dime, and Anthrax’s frantic energy strains at the leash, while Belladonna barks like a Doberman at times and soars to the sun when coaxed to fly, like he does on the retina-scorching supernova “Crawl.” Always ready to do battle in the streets if they have to – as the haymaker-throwing, nose-bloodying riots of “The Constant” and “Revolution Screams” bear out – with Worship Music, Anthrax has come to blow open the doors of cathedrals everywhere and unleash hell.

-Peter Lindblad

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