Havok – Time Is Up

site | label | buy

Young thrashers Havok were responsible for one of the best thrash releases of 2009 with their debut album Burn, and quickly gained a faithful following, making their second album on Candlelight Records a highly anticipated release. Although Havok didn’t do a great deal wrong with Burn two years ago, indeed we gave it the full five stars at the time, Time Is Up is an improvement. Moving away from the sound of early Metallica which presided over Burn, the new material sounds closer to present-day Exodus; harder and meaner but still intelligible and sharp. It’s not the smartest stuff around, as thrash rarely tends to be (lots of stock thrash wordings in songs like Prepare For Attack, Covering Fire and Killing Tendencies), and won’t challenge some of the more thoughtful lyric-writers in the genre, but it is top-drawer thrash music and far more deserving of praise than most of the young thrashers around at the moment. Indeed even as Evile have slipped into Slayer plagiarism, Municipal Waste et al can’t mature away from the party/skater angle and Bonded By Blood and Mutant can’t stop singing about science fiction and horror movies, Havok can, along with Suicidal Angels and Angelus Apatrida, at least claim to have developed their own sound built upon that of some of the old masters. They aren’t going to trouble the legends just yet, but are showing they have a hell of a lot of riffs and melodies (see Killing Tendencies) in them for now, far more than a lot of their by-the-numbers contemporaries.

Written by Andy Lye
More: 2011, Albums, Quick.Play Reviews, Thrash Metal, Havok