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Released on July 9, 2015 via GFY Productions
First, a potted history of Turbocharged. They’ve been making a very specific hybrid of anti-Christian punky death metal since they started way back in 2000, none of which saw the day till about 2008 when they put out two demos in two years, neither of which made much impact with the public, but, off the back of those demos, they put out a début album called AntiXtian, in 2010. It’s a reasonable début – nothing surprising, but still a pretty good listen. After that they put out Christ Zero (2012) on a different label (Chaos Records), then their last album, 2013’s Area 666, both of which are also good, serviceable metal albums.
Why tell you this? Militant, their latest release, is much the same as their other albums, with little to no progression between releases. It’s still good, and fun to listen to, and I bet they’re great live, but from a songwriting perspective Militant could have come at any point in the band’s career. I don’t get the impression that the band pushes themselves from release to release, or that this is a band that is any better for being together fifteen years, as opposed to eight years. It’s impressive that they can be so persistent in style and tone, not wavering at all from the punky death metal sound, and I suppose if they are still releasing music like this fifteen years hence, then it will be noteworthy. Slayer have built a career on it after all, but Turbocharged are not Slayer.
Of course you can’t criticise a band for not being Slayer, history’s greatest metal band (even though I just sort of did); what I’m saying is that if you’re going to make very similar music album after album, with nary a sign of progression, then you better be making brilliant music. There’s nothing to say that Turbocharged couldn’t one day make brilliant music, and Militant is by no means a bad album, the music just isn’t good enough to dedicate your entire career to making. That said, Turbocharged have certainly stepped up the production values between this album and Area 666 – the vocals are crisp, the guitar tone is thick and sexy, and there’s plenty of surprisingly catchy tunes here – if you don’t find yourself mentally returning to ‘Where the Sodomites Never Burned’ for hours after listening, you’re stronger than I am. It’s also the best song here, flitting nicely between a chugging sing-along chorus, pained shrieks and hyper-fast riffing.
This makes the album difficult to review in that each song, taken on its own terms, is good, but as an album it gets repetitive after the fourth or fifth track. ‘Massive Worldwide Armageddon’ is a great example of this – it’s a really good song, but coming in as it does at track seven, it gets lost amongst a sea of songs that sound exactly like it. ‘Popecleaver’ manages to stand out by virtue of pinched harmonics, an unusual solo, and popecleaver being a fantastic word. If there’s an area in which this album excels itself when set against others of the genre, it’s through remarkably clear vocals – given a few listens to a song, I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t work out at least 80% of the lyrics – a remarkable feat given the usually muddy cries extreme metal vocalists tend to employ.
Militant is a solid album, nothing more and nothing less.
