If you were browsing the racks of your favorite record store (they still exist, I swear) and came across an album called Speed Metal Hell by an umlauted Töxik Death, you would assume they played a progressive, atmospheric, shoegazing style of post-rock, right? You’d be prepared to hear delicately sung paeans to frogs and daisies and Thomas Kincaid landscapes, right? You’d settle in with a cozy cup of your favorite chamomile tea and an oversized cardigan and just feel the stresses of the day melt away into the Enya-sized ambience, right?
Jollity aside, Speed Metal Hell is exactly the sort of busted jaw brilliance you need in your life if you’ve worn out multiple copies of Voivod’s War and Pain and Sodom’s Obsessed by Cruelty, and if you love Aura Noir but really wish they played a bit sloppier. Töxik Death, perhaps unsurprisingly, hail from Norway, and although they come from Sandnes on the country’s southwest coast, their kinship is clearly with the black/thrash of Oslo’s Aura Noir, and the Darkthrone-affiliated Kolbotn Thrashers Union, including other such sloppily delicious deviants as Condor and Nekromantheon.
The word I keep coming back to is “sloppy,” but I don’t mean that derogatorily. This is a perfectly pungent sort of sloppiness, so if you prefer you could call Töxik Death “loose” and “raw” instead. Throughout Speed Metal Hell, these chaps are clearly more interested in pursuing feeling over technique, and passion over precision. If you feel like just slicing yourself on Occam’s dang ol’ razor, I suppose I could just leave it at telling you that the song titles basically provide you with all the information necessary to determine your likely enjoyment of the album: “Thrashforces of Evil,” “D-Beat Destructor,” and “DeathTerrorSexSlaughter,” for example, work like tiny winking cyphers for the underground-ensconced cryptographers among us. Crudely violent guitar solos flail around, the drums clatter and splash like real actual live drums, and E.N.’s vocals waltz their way across a home-made scrapbook stuffed with photos of Voivod’s Snake, Mille Petrozza, and Tom Angelripper, all postmarked ca. 1984.
There are plenty of pitfalls for a band hoping to walk the tightrope between black and thrash. If you veer too much to thrash, you can lose some of the sinister atmosphere that makes plenty of trench-digging nerds still hold up In the Sign of Evil and Sentence of Death as crucial to the development of black metal. Tilt too much toward the blacker end of the spectrum, though, and you can lose the fiendish catchiness and unrelenting rhythmic bite of speed-obsessed thrash. Throughout these rusty blade-sharp thirty-two minutes, though, Töxik Death nail a perfect middle ground, lunging and spitting with just enough first-wave grimnity to make one wish they’d toss in a cover of Bathory’s “In Conspiracy with Satan,” while at the same time thrashing with such mad butcher glee that the chorus to a song like “Sergeant of the Wasteland” is likely to get lodged in your brain like a turkey bone in the neck of the disintegrating universe.
Töxik Death is interested in neither progression nor sophistication, and it seems eminently likely that they’d keep thrashing out this gleeful noise in some scuzzy practice space in Norway whether or not any damn fool such as yourself is out there listening. In fact, they’re probably doing it right now, so shut your sandwich-hole, open your dogbreath ears, and see if you can’t just make out the strains of the spool-length guitar solo that closes “Highway Warrior” floating on the aerial currents from Sandnes to wherever you’ve planted your silly bones. Your city is guilty: the crime is life; the sentence is death — Speed Metal Hell descends.
