Artist: Extrema
Label: Scarlet Records
Release: 2009
Duration: 44:05
Rating: 2/5
Extrema are basically an Italian thrash metal band that formed all the way back in 1986. “Pound For Pound” is their 5th studio album. Italy isn’t exactly the homeland of thrash, but Italians have always been strong in progressive rock and classic heavy metal, which they’ve occasionally topped off with a bigger or smaller dose of pomp. Given all the hype the band’s official promo text is stuffed with, the long experience, the huge amount of stage mileage racked up as support for giants like Death Angel, Slayer or Metallica, I’d have expected “Pound For Pound” to be the absolute thrash metal peak of 2009. Oh, and by the way: this year Extrema will play MetalCamp in Tolmin for the second time.
Even though I’d never heard a single record from the band before “Pound For Pound”, and despite more than twenty years of existence, “Pound For Pound” absolutely, positively fails to stir anything in my ears beyond a feeling of lukewarm soup. The bright spot is the band’s rhythm section, while the riffs sorely lack more raw, possessed walls of sound, and the vocals are far, far too mild to talk about a typical old-school thrash march. In places the vocals are often questionable, since they love to veer off into a hardcore scream, though you can tell his idol is Phil Anselmo, and then, especially in the choruses, there are moments where he slips into the melodic clean style typical of American post-grunge bands.
The riffs are generic and, if we’re going to look for “thrash” at all, they lean heavily on the European thrash legacy inherited from bands like Sodom, Kreator and Destruction, without any hint of the freshness needed to make the band interesting or recognizable.
“Pound For Pound” is a record you can hardly call a pure thrash metal album. Fall Down is a mix of pandering to the trendy “groove”, where clean, melodic vocals pull toward the kind of melodies used by post grungers a la Nickelback or Staind. Even the much more fiery and wildly accelerated Frownig And Haggard contains a touch of that pretty melodic lace with clean, pathetic vocals. By the time you plow through The Bad Itself and on to For The Sake Of Our Children, there’s no doubt left that these guys are actually blowing the nu-metal horn. What are you supposed to think when you hear Deuce, an original by Kiss, in the hands of Extrema? My Mysery then closes things out as a sort of epitaph for post-grunge.
A “cross over” album of sorts that brings nothing new. Not even in production terms does it reach the level of white-hot rawness and noise that extreme metal demands. In fact, Extrema can really only thrive on the Italian market in this respect. There are moments of greater interest (on the rhythmic side), like You Make Me Sick, which you can break your legs trying to dance to, and in the closing stretch, where they finally spew some metal flame and at least tickle the ears a little with From The 80’s, but otherwise the guys have nothing exciting to say with “Pound For Metal”, so you won’t miss much if you happen to overlook this album.
Line-up
Gianluca Perotti – vocals
Tommy Massara – guitar
Mattia Bigi – bass guitar
Paolo Crimi – drums
Production
Riccardo “Paso” Pasini
Track list
1. Everlasting
2. Anymore
3. Selfishness
4. Fall Down
5. Frowning and Haggard
6. The Bad Itself
7. You Make Me Sick
8. For the Sake of Our Children
9. Fat Liars
10. Deuce
11. From the 80’s
12. My Misery
13. F.Y.W.
