Venom And Tears

 Four years have passed since we lost Pantera, and plenty of distrust has been earned in that time by all kinds of blowhards who promised a spark of Pantera’s energy and decked themselves out in the feathers and achievements of fighters like Pantera undoubtedly were. Many of them were just sorry knockoffs, and even more never listened to a single Pantera record in their lives, they just struck poses for the cameras. They forgot the real core of it all, what HC ideals and a metal attitude actually stand for. Throwdown could therefore be written off and shot down right away, since magazines like Metal Hammer call them a band that “diligently makes the heaviest metal, with the heaviest stride this side of Texas, proudly and defiantly keeping the memory of Pantera alive”. But Throwdown differ from most of the rest precisely because they are, and live, the HC way of life, where pissing blood is the rule and not the exception, and their steel-solid principles give them that missing factor that ordinary posers can’t work into the equation of the Pantera-style formula. And how can someone help with that when they’re the one whose hands shaped albums by bands like Avenged Sevenfold and Godsmack or Powerman 5000? Mudrock’s meddling is best heard by simply following the red thread of the album.

Venom And Tears, the latest record from these Californian HC post-thrashers, is without a doubt their ticket to a definitive breakthrough into metal circles, because it’s an evolution in both music and songwriting. Hell – if we’re being honest, we’d admit right away that Throwdown sound the way Pantera probably would have sounded in 2007, and Dave Petters deserves the title of best imitator of Anselmo’s vocals in Pantera’s prime. Venom And Tears offers its own version of what you could hear on legendary albums like Vulgar Display Of Power or Far Beyond Driven. ‘Holy Roller’ cuts in on the first beat at the speed of light, and the foursome spill their heart’s blood and guts with surgical precision, right away, in a way that unites hardcore kids and metalheads in one big family. Mark Choiniere’s guitar work is done with distinction. The only thing separating him from Dimebag is that the late Dimebag used way more solos, but Choiniere still serves up a decent and more than just tasty sound. Matt Mentley and drummer Ben Dussault round out the picture with total control of volume and total command of rhythm. No deviations from the golden line. And that golden line consistently raises middle fingers at organized religion, the crumbling American society and warmongering foreign policy, in a very articulate way. “Sermon of hate / Spoken between a smile and words of piety / Well I’ve got a use for you / It’s time we stuck the pig / Teeth in my tongue for far too long / I’ve watched your lechery / So let this be your requiem / When there’s no eulogy I’ll speak.” They carry on in the same manner in ‘Day Of The Dog’, and by the time they get to ‘S.C.U.M.’ you drop every safeguard you tried to listen to this album with, strictly critically. Memories of Machine Head, Sepultura and all the other forefathers of the nineties sound come flooding back, the sound that let metal outgrow the wretched confines it had fallen into in the eighties, with the narrow-minded, pathetic yammering about boozing, macho logic and homophobia replaced by more mentally aware HC activism and political criticism. Throwdown shake hands with the legends of modern punk Bad Religion, and the lyric “Fuck the gangs of middle class suburbia, the gutter punks, their Prozac-medicated parents too strung out to give a shit” sounds like something that could have come from Greg Graffin’s pen. “If I see another pedophile priest released, a hipster glam-rock wannabe, a cop shooting an unarmed teen, I’ll carve my eyes out with a stick.” tops it off with what could only be a defiant pose delivered in a fear-inspiring tone of sincerity. What else is there to add? ‘Americana’ is a reckoning with the collapse of the value system. “All hail the god on TV / White noise medicating / Rape and murder, holy war / Nothing phases me / […] / Eyes wide, fixed and dilated / A myriad of rich white trash / Nothing phases me.” And that collapsed system dishes out its lessons in the form of grenade-like preaching and machine-gun-fire conversion of the true believers in its principles. ‘Hellbent (On War)’ defends the colors of pacifism. “Now we’re well past words and threats and everything in between / No more restraint, just pure hostility / Confrontation, intimidation, vindication… / An eye for an eye / A tooth for a tooth / But a code of violence and vengeance is written in blood” and this is followed by an HC chorus of group-shouted slogans like “Blood for Blood”. Even though we set out on a mission to find weaknesses, at first glance there are none to be seen anywhere further on. ‘No Love’ doesn’t put a bandage on any wounds, ‘Venom And Tears’ drives the fangs of revolt even deeper into the corpse of a dying society, and the decadent dance of pleasure and seductive rhythm hides a bit more than mere sex appeal. And from track to track the feeling that this is a Pantera plagiarism fades, since one of the stronger arguments is that Throwdown can write socially conscious lyrics, while with the Texas legends you could detect at least a smidgen of boozy racism and woman-hating Confederate nostalgia. And keep one more thing in mind: Pantera, too, faced an avalanche of accusations during its lifetime that they were stealing ideas from other bands… Surely D.R.I. fell into the copy-spectrograph palette at some point too, and ‘I, Suicide’ plays around with a riff you could expect from those thrash-punkers. And after a while, all the constant associations make everything seem so similar and you give such a damn little that you barely notice the album is over, and the big finale this time comes from a cover of Sepultura’s ‘Propaganda’, which the guys play so convincingly and polished that you almost miss a slip-up or two.

Venom And Tears is a step forward from Throwdown’s earlier releases, a band that picked the already-lived-through nineties as the proving ground for its new musical bloom. Only on such an easily accepted foundation is it possible to keep an HC-metal hybrid alive, one that sounds incredibly authentic and fresh next to all the junk from modern-day little posers and metalcore airheads. And you can’t spot even a hint of the sticky tape that, in places, quite obviously holds together some loose joints. Rustic and already heard, sure, but still sexy, critical and seasoned just right with a pinch of anger and self-proving. Definitely more than fitting reading for all Pantera lovers and those who swear by southern metal melodies and HC vocals. Reinventing lukewarm water makes no sense, since grandma’s recipe already hinted at everything you need to make a dish edible. If you’re expecting something completely new and revolutionary, well, just turn the page quickly and trot off toward the desert of frustrated inventors and musical perverts who console themselves that their work is a step forward from the bulk of the metal mainstream. Throwdown will survive even without the eternal whiners. Verdict: Throwdown by no means deserve a special award for special achievements and lifetime work, but this is definitely a more than likable little record that has earned a spot near the player for a few more spins.