Heretic certainly are a legacy band, having been formed in 1985 and releasing a single full-length album in 1988 before splitting up and reforming in 2011. The members of Heretic must have felt some sort of artistic need to reform as they seem to be all but forgotten from the history of thrash metal. Their 1988 debut album Breaking Point is perfectly fine but when considering the big four all had released their landmark albums by that point it seems very primitive. So, the question we are presented with is: has the reunion re-energised Heretic?
The hardest thing to do as a reviewer is to review an album that sits perfectly in the middle of the scale. Neither terrible or amazing, not good or bad, just fine. A Game You Cannot Win falls into this category. I’ll start with the positive aspects of the album. Never Added Up is a great song, despite the intro which made this reviewer stop in a public place and exclaim “Oh no! Oh NO!” on first hearing it, as it seemed to indicate a ballad was coming. Thankfully after thirty or so seconds the song kicks into full blooded thrash, with plenty of melodic variance and turns off pace to keep the song interesting. This is complemented by the production on the album giving the guitars a well-rounded weight that really kicks when backed up by some excellent bass work.
Unfortunately, having the greatest production can’t save all the riffing on the album being completely forgettable. The guitars just chug along at mid-tempo throughout. If Angel of Death by Slayer is a sprint then this album is jogging with all the wind knocked out of it, especially on songs like Demonized. Mid-tempo thrash can work; Metallica are arguably at their best when they hit that mid-tempo stomp but Heretic never really try to go for that approach either. The vocal approach also lacks the grit to make the songs sound furious and memorable melodic hooks. The combination of this vocal approach and the bland riffing makes the album become a drag. With only one stand-out song, a fifty-one minute run time and both an intro and an outro track which add nothing of value to this album, you’ll be checking to see how much longer is left of the album well before half of it is over.
The song writing also leaves a lot to be desired. For example, during the chorus of Broken Hero, my brain began filling a different melody, which would have sounded a lot better. I think that’s probably worse than having a chorus that’s just got a bad melody. Being able to hear how much better the song could have been, just makes the failure to achieve that feel so much worse. While there is not a lot of experimentation in song structure, when they do experiment it falls flat. This is best illustrated in the intro to Never Added Up or the short clean guitar based break in Broken Heroes that almost immediately swings back into plodding guitar chugging. Had this album been released prior to Master of Puppets, this bland song writing may have been excusable, but Master of Puppets showed the world just how much you could experiment with thrash song writing. Now to have such a bland album more than thirty years later is just disappointing. I’m not saying this album needs to be as good as one of the greatest albums of all time, but if there was more variation in the song structure the album would be greatly improved.
While Heretic have clearly returned with intent, their strict adherence to the past makes them sound very dated. Heretic have delivered an album that is fine. But I can’t imagine many people were demanding a reunion of a band that seemed to have been forgotten. Heretic therefore needed to prove that they could come back with a consistently good album. While I haven’t listened to their first post-reunion album all the way through, A Game You Cannot Win isn’t motivating me to investigate their back catalogue in much detail. Sadly, Heretic seem destined to go down in history as just another thrash band. I hope that next time out they can produce an album with more creative riffing and song writing to really justify their return.
Highlights: Never Added Up
A Game You Cannot Win is out on 27th October 2017 via Dissonance productions. You can purchase the album here.
The band can be found here:
