Recently I received swag of Aussie records to review from various people in the industry and the release of ‘Foul Play’ by a Perth based band Malignant Monster has unsurprisingly spent the most time in my CD player meaning, it's most impressive. It’s a truly very solid thrash action packed release with a hint of melodic death metal with blackened vocals to spice things up.
Three of seven tracks found here are new songs while the rest are re-recorded material which originally came from their 2004 demo titled ‘Welcome To Your Doom!’. A Megadeth cover of Liar coming of 1988’s effort titled So Far, So Good...So What! is also jam-packed here as is a very high resolution bonus video ‘Old Corpus Dilecti’ which looked amazing and quite enjoyable to see. If you could get your hands on this limited edition CD (try Perth based label Prime Cuts Music) it would introduce the band to you very well and would keep you thrashing on your feet for a long time coming.
Now I have a question for those that do purchase a lot of local releases as of late: Is it my imagination or do videos now days come standard with every album release? Take your time answering. It’s a definitely good idea especially for the promos; EP’s or demo albums where the length is significantly shorter than normal with most cases…
Back to the music, it is extremely sharp, tense and ultra fast. Theme of blood is exercised quite a bit throughout the opening track where the band showcases their ability to play old school thrash metal and not being afraid to take it further with Cain Cresall‘s very talented blackened vocals (still retaining the gruesome and brutal growls) and Ben Stanleys’s heavier blast beats pushing the envelope on more than one occasion on the album.
With each track the band definitely displays more diversity within their music style introducing melodic guitars every now and then without sacrificing their original thrash sound. The lyrical theme is all about blood, exile, rage and death so much so that it reflects on the booklet as the colour of blood is painted throughout which makes it very hard to make out most of the text print as the font size used was quite small. I am sure this was intentional but perhaps tried to be tad too clever?
The Megadeth cover at the end is played faultlessly and gives us a nice comparison of arrangements between the two thrash bands. Perhaps the band will look to do some more covers but this time of Exodus or Kreator as I believe it will reflect their music much more than Megadeth does. If you are looking for ripping fast thrash/death material with amazing black metal vocals at the helm and some interesting instrumental trickery, look no further. You found Malignant Monster.
Favourite tracks: Line Of Fire & My Rage.
1. Old Corpus Delecti
2. Line Of Fire
3. My Rage
4. Drive The Nails
5. Consequences Of Indecision
6. Turrets Of Blood
7. Liar
