Beseiged - Victims Beyond All Help



Like Community's Pierce and his semi-mantra, "It just came up organically," (about banging Eartha Kitt in an airline bathroom, generally), most great forms of metal music, if not music outright, emerged as reactions to other music scenes: NWOBHM reacted to rock-- speed metal, like Motorhead, found NWOBHM too staid-- speed metal fucked hardcore acts like Gang Green and/or D.R.I., and begat thrash metal-- thrash metal popped out death metal--
et frackin' cetera....

Most recent "re-thrash" outfits (I'm looking at you, recent technically-accomplished yet overall-lacking re-thrash outfit whose name starts with "H") tend to seem like inspired covers of... Men From Long Ago. Problem is, those men-- they weren't playing in standard with lots of palm muting at high velocities that started and stopped on a dime and generally had political lyrics because That Was Where Life Had Put Their Music, but because They Loved Rocking Out... and at that time, Rocking Out meant playing thrash metal.

Do you see the difference?

Victims Beyond All Help seems like it arose (Sepultura cough! See Below!) organically, without commercial intention: the fine fellows in Beseiged seem angry and like they'd never heard metal at all before playing-- and somehow, perfectly randomly, they made protest music that sounds like something you and I have called "thrash metal" for over two decades.

Their ad copy cites Beneath the Remains and Darkness Descends (which, to this day, I still think of as being sounds heard from a green cassette, via Kevin in my Freshman Biology class)-- and is overall quite the accurate talking point....

Victims Beyond All Help is to be released July 9, 2013 (with an Ed Repka cover no less --and this a particularly-cool one, like Sepultura's Arise, though otherwise...? Generic name, logo, and what?!-type album cover... though to be fair, it looks like a tape I would've bought solely for said cool cover, this probably on Roadrunner Records circa 1989... not unlike Obituary's Cause of Death...).
So, anyway, there is in fact a review in here. It begins NOW.

First and foremost: great drummer! (He doubles the count... always! And this at rather high velocities!)... great drum sound overall: tasty, minimalist... sounds like someone using a cardboard box for a snare, but somehow this completely works and ends up sounding something like Neal Peart if he were homeless and just randomly drumming on shit around him versus playing in Rush.

Riffs? Clever; and this, for a thrash band (something not normally required for a good thrash album overall, where it's more important to have a clever arrangement (see Vio-Lence's Eternal Nightmare), versus a genre like stoner/doom/sludge, which lives and dies by a specific refrain, or "riffs")....
Nutshelled-- sounds like Beneath the Remains-type tunes, but (somehow) recorded during the Arise sessions; signer sounds a ton like Max Cavalera, ca. 1988....

Oh... opener "Internal Suffering," has no intro: no fucking acoustic intro, or a Goddamned ambient intro, or a swell-in, or what-fucking ever: at approximately 0.1 second in, the tune takes fucking off: fast as fuck and endorsing of no Bullshit....

FYI: they're from Winnipeg, Manitoba... I somehow picture them touring with non-nonsense Canadian metalheads like 3 Inches of Blood and Bison BC....

--Horn



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