Heretic: Breaking Point (1988)
Like Armored Saint, basically.
As I started collecting my thoughts and facts, personal recollections and third person testimonials, about Los Angeles also-rans Heretic, I kept on reading words like “speed” and thrash,” and scratching my head ... because, to me, these guys were always a “right-down-the-center” heavy metal band.
Well, turns out I’ve not lost all my marbles yet, because, just as I remembered it, Heretic’s sole album, 1988’s Breaking Point, featured only a couple of genuine speed metal sprints in the opening “Heretic” and late cut “Let ‘em Bleed.”
That’s just two songs out of ten, people!
Everything else here takes the pedal OFF the metal and sounds like many other, “right-down-the-center” heavy metal bands signed to Metal Blade over the years (Omen, Helstar, Hallows Eve, etc.), following a pro forma appearance on a Metal Massacre compilation -- number VII, in Heretic’s case.
But they especially resemble Armored Saint, because of vocalist Mike Howe’s striking similarity to John Bush’s tones, timbre and cadence across competent head-bangers like “The Circle,” “The Enemy Within” and “Shifting Fire.”
Except for final song “The Search,” which meshes acoustic an electric elements within a mini-epic framework that may have accidentally served as Howe’s “audition” for Metal Church, which recruited him ahead of 1989’s Blessing in Disguise, and simultaneously ended Heretic’s brief existence.
Although, in a typically incestuous game of metallic musical chairs, the Metal Church singer Howe replaced, David Wayne, wound up hiring two unemployed Heretics -- guitarist Brian Korban and bassist Dennis O’Hara -- to fill the ranks of his new band, Reverend.
So, anyway, here’s how this will probably play out: you’ll spin Heretic’s Breaking Point more than half-a-dozen times before you register anything particularly memorable about their “right-down-the-center” heavy metal, but then you’ll suddenly decide it’s not half bad.
But it’s NOT thrash or speed metal.
Update: R.I.P. Mike Howe, who sadly passed about two weeks after I posted this blog.
More Classic American ‘80s Metal: Agent Steel’s Skeptics Apocalypse, Armored Saint’s March of the Saint, Ashbury’s Endless Skies, Brocas Helm's Into Battle, Cirith Ungol’s King of the Dead, Crimson Glory’s Crimson Glory, Culprit’s Guilty as Charged, Fifth Angel’s Fifth Angel, Griffin’s Flight of the Griffin, Jag Panzer’s Ample Destruction, Leatherwolf’s Leatherwolf, Liege Lord’s Master Control, Manilla Road’s Crystal Logic, Manowar’s Hail to England, Metal Church’s Metal Church, Omen’s Battle Cry, Q5’s Steel the Light, Queensrÿche’s Queensrÿche EP, Savatage’s Sirens, Stygian Shore’s Stygian Shore EP, Virgin Steele’s Guardians of the Flame.