Overkill: Feel the Fire (1985)
It’s ‘Green Wax Week’ at VinySpinning, and if you can think of a better naming gimmick involving the color green, I’m all ears ...
At my age (don’t ask), two years zoom by like the blink of an eye, but they of course feel like a virtual eternity to a teenager, going through all those ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, and a teenager was I’d just become when thrash metal started taking over the world in 1983 and ‘84.
So imagine, if you will, the kind of pseudo-eternity that transpired -- in my mind anyway -- between Metallica’s Kill ‘em All and Slayer’s Show no Mercy, and the arrival of Overkill’s first full-length, Feel the Fire, in October of 1985 ... I mean, Master of Puppets and Reign in Blood would soon be in record stores!
The pride (or bane, depending on who you ask) of Old Bridge, New Jersey was formed in 1980, by bassist Carlo ‘D.D.’ Verni and drummer Rat Skates (real name Lee John Kundrat), whose chosen stage handles (tributes to Dee Dee Ramone and The Damned’s Rat Scabies, respectively) betrayed their punk rock roots.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that ... see this album’s excellent cover of the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer.”
But, over time, the fledgling band turned to hardcore, then metal, then thrash, briefly partnering with future Anthrax shredder Dan Spitz before recruiting guitarist Bobby Gustafson and singer Bobby ‘Blitz’ Ellsworth to form what many of us consider the ‘classic’ Overkill line-up.
Signed to Jersey’s own Megaforce Records on the strength of ‘83’s Power in Black demo and a self-titled, four-track EP released in early ‘85 through the Metal Storm label (which also had a hand in Dark Angel’s earliest efforts), the quartet were now well and fully versed in the methods of the mosh pit.
Yet, to experienced, ‘sophisticated’ thrash fans like myself (don’t laugh), frantic blasts like “Raise the Dead,” “Second Son,” and “Hammerhead” seemed positively archaic by the time I even heard them, sometime in ‘86, if not later.
Today they sound fan-fucking-tastic: so pure, so raw, so fast -- vintage thrash.
And, for all my precocious, unwarranted prejudice, Feel the Fire yielded a clutch of early Overkill staples in the title track, “Blood and Iron,” and arguably the most Overkill song of them all: “Rotten to the Core” -- a band signature on par with their toxic green logo and branding.
In sum: though they were a little late to the dance -- or the pit, as it were -- Overkill would soon be able to brag that they were among the first thrash bands to sign with a major label, when Atlantic Records scooped up their sophomore album, Taking Over, and hung with the band into the early ‘90s.
Today, the band is of course still going long, if not necessarily strong, within sight of their twentieth studio LP in a four-decade career; a career that has probably gone by in a flash for them, as it has for me, compared to those crucial, ever-lasting couple years of one’s impressionable youth.
More Overkill: Taking Over, Under the Influence, The Years of Decay, I Hear Black, W.F.O.
