Power Trip – Manifest Decimation (Southern Lord Records)
With a few exceptions, most of the really outstanding metal releases this year have owed some serious debts to a variety of bygone eras. Magic Circle evoked Pagan Altar/Candlemass doom, Noisem managed to sound like the follow-up to Seven Churches that Possessed should have written, and Darkthrone once again reinvented themselves, this time as cheap-beer-and-denim speed metal militants. Dallas crossover unit Power Trip are no exception.
Power Trip – Manifest Decimation (Southern Lord Records)
With a few exceptions, most of the really outstanding metal releases this year have owed some serious debts to a variety of bygone eras. Magic Circle evoked Pagan Altar/Candlemass doom, Noisem managed to sound like the follow-up to Seven Churches that Possessed should have written, and Darkthrone once again reinvented themselves, this time as cheap-beer-and-denim speed metal militants. Dallas crossover unit Power Trip are no exception. Like the aforementioned bands, they concoct music that is the sum of some fairly distinct parts, and also like the others, they manage to personalize the style so that it comes off as a loving tribute rather than as a direct imitation of any particular artist of yore. Unlike these others, however, they work within a genre that, though it produced a handful of great albums (Animosity-era Corrosion Of Conformity, Nuclear Assault’s 80s output, and ironically everything D.R.I did up to the Crossover album), rarely lived up to its potential. As a nexus between hardcore and metal, crossover rarely lived up to the grit and intensity of the former or the atmosphere and darkness of the latter.
Power Trip, with the aid of the hindsight bestowed upon them by the decade and a half between the style’s initial fall from popularity and the band’s formation, chose wisely when excavating influences from which to construct their sound. The lean, metallic thrust of the better Crumbsuckers material is readily apparent, as is the heft of early Cro-Mags, and the speed of Exodus. But Manifest Decimation succeeds because it doesn’t sound too heavily reminiscent of any one of its predecessors, instead capturing the general zeitgeist of crossover’s glory days (and if there were a band to which they could be directly compared, it would likely be fellow Texans Iron Age, who deftly blended influences in much the same manner as Power Trip).
Many such bands have a difficult transition from short-form EP release to full-length (even some of the best – D.R.I got progressively less intense with each successive release past their earliest EPs), but Power Trip demonstrates a songwriting competence that sustains the material over a longer duration. From the start, the album features a well-developed sense of pacing, with its component songs unfurling and receding as a series of alternating thrashing and stomping, each informing the other. In their capable hands, the hardcore and thrash metal elements that crossover tended to mash against each other with varied results end up a far more coherent final product, one where the power of each song is maximized by a solid understanding of both the self-contained power and each riff and the dynamics of their total interactions.
Manifest Decimation is ultimately successful because it’s of the past, without attempting to be a part of it. Their music is the sound of a genre learning hard lessons and moving on, excising the excess, hardening the sonic violence, and moving towards the sort of greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts end result that crossover was supposed to represent in the first place. This isn’t some attempt to cash in on the popularity of a style that’s experienced a somewhat surprising resurgence in popularity in recent years, but rather acts as an unstoppable sonic bulldozer of the highest caliber.
