Review Summary: A Power/Thrash-metal hybrid from the days when such a mixed breed was barely possible.
I took a huge chance buying this cassette the summer it was released.
(Even in middle school I preferred the artwork and sound quality of LP’s. But at that time a stopover at the record store was usually the first stop in a long day of weekend skating, where other stopovers involved small packs of frenzied boys defacing infrastructure with curb grinds and rail slides, and where delicate LPs were in terrible danger from crashes and failed kick-flips.
And this wasn’t even considering the dangers from roving pick-up trucks filled with testosterone driven high-school jocks, either returning from football practice or just good naturedly driving around looking for someone to harass or, in the worst-case scenario -- God help us -- returning from an afternoon game after a loss and looking for someone to punish for it.
(I should add that truckloads of stoners, whose music we are now considering, and some of whom may be reading this review, were also a threat, but slightly less so because of our similarly nonconforming dress and attitudes, and our often-shared friends and tastes in music. Also, while the average thrasher of that day was as volatile as the average line backer, in my experience their pugilism was geared more towards honorable, one-on-one combat, usually at parties and shows. Football players, on the other hand, spend hours a week training for coordinated group violence against preferably weaker enemy tribes, the values of winning and acquiring trophies usually taking priority over honor in that particular culture)).
Anyway, new music was a lot more precious when I picked up Onslaught’s 1989's
In Search of Sanity. This was decades before streaming. My allowance afforded me at most two new cassettes per month, so I heard most new music from friends who had already taken a gamble by purchasing a record of unknown quality. But borrowing music from such people came with a price: I occasionally had to cross my fingers, take a chance and buy stuff I’d never heard, and then share it back out if it was any good. It was the only way to hear music that was different from the usual mellow stuff they played on the radio.
(Incidentally, in case anyone still wonders how anyone could possibly NOT love Metallica’s black album, my guess is that some of the hate stems from this affordability issue: It badly shocked a lot of people who greatly valued new music. Here, I don’t mean value in its aesthetic sense, as in "I appreciate new music.” No, I mean value in its economic sense, as in "I can't afford new music." Buying the new Metallica was a f*cking no brainer for everyone, remember? It was a no brainer whether you could afford one record or twenty records per month. And if you couldn’t afford the new Metallica, you borrowed the needed funds.
So, I picked up the black album the day it came out, I came home totally stoked, popped it in the player and SURPRISE SUCKER! IT’S NOT WHAT YOU EXPECTED! Medium, medium, slow, slow, slow. Man, f*cking slow and mellow. Relaxed. Suddenly I was stuck with something that sounded a lot closer to Radio Metal than Ride the Lightening, stuck with no new purchases until at least my next paycheck. Damn. At least by then I had busboy wages, but I still felt burned. And I wasn’t alone. Slayer’s Dave Lombardo said he chucked it down the stairs. And you know what? If it was okay for him to be disappointed by it, it was okay for me).
As I was saying, I was as surprised by Onslaught’s 1989
In Search of Sanity as I was shocked by Metallica’s eponymous album a couple years later, but pleasantly surprised in Onslaught's case. I knew Onslaught from a song on a mixtape -- their earlier, fu
cking killer track
“Let There Be Death” -- and I was expecting something similar.
That’s not what I got, but what I got was still excellent.
Onslaught's music has a clear fingerprint; the personalities of their riffs and rhythms have stayed pretty consistent over the years, and the riff style on this album still sounds pretty consistent with the music they wrote before and after it. What’s different is the clean vocals. For whereas the riffs and rhythms -- though containing slightly more tuneful melodies and less dissonant harmonies -- are still basically thrashy, the band recruited the late Steve Grimmett for this album, who was the vocalist of the band Grim Reaper, a now almost forgotten part of the NWOBHM. Grimmett belts out long, clean melodies that may not have the timbre or the charisma of contemporaries like Dickenson or Halford, but competes with them well in terms of power and pitch.
My problem with the album -- like this review perhaps -- is that it is far too long for its quality. True, the title track from Metallica’s 1988
And Justice for All is almost ten minutes long. But that’s Metallica. And even Kirk Hammett complained about its excessive length after the tour for that record, vowing never to play it live again. All of Onslaught’s music on here is great but, unlike Metallica, it’s just not great enough to justify multiple songs with seven- and eight-minute runtimes, not counting the excellent but almost thirteen-minute-long ballad “Welcome to Dying.”
I enjoyed the music on
In Search of Sanity at the time, but I also thought it was really weird; it didn’t quite fit into anything I had heard before. There's a glaring contrast between the violence of the guitars and lyrics --
die die die, die in my blitzkrieg! -- and the impassioned vocal style. At the time I compared it to music I knew, thrash metal records like Onslaught's previous album, or to heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, and none of that fit very well.
I think I understand it better now. It’s best compared to an album I hadn't heard yet when I bought
In Search of Sanity: Helloween's
Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II, released only the year before. Or better yet to Blind Guardian’s second album
Follow the Blind, also released in 1989. That would make
In Search of Sanity an early power metal record. Yet, it still isn’t really Power Metal. Not
really. The difference is probably technical in a way that I don’t understand because I am neither a guitarist nor a drummer, but it just doesn’t sound quite the same as power metal. Instead, it is just its own thing: A singular, one-time experiment that didn’t pay off very well for the band but paid off for me in spades for my own gamble, and for metal fans generally.
Maybe its uniqueness is why it's not celebrated nearly as much as it should be.
