'Ticket's There' – Irish and International Music Blog

After seeing these guys on Saturday night at the Wacken Metal battle semi-finals, we’re confident there’s a future for thrash metal in Ireland. Taking their influence from Megadeth, ‘Kill Em All’ era Metallica (when they were actually thrash, like) and the Priest (Judas, not the other kind), the band play fast, heavy metal with riffs, solos and glass cutting vocals. Their second EP, Ground Zero, came out last year and it’s about time you heard it. Welcome to EXZELTIC

Kicking off with ‘Devastator’, the EP launches into raw thrash, under produced but sounding great. The solos are killer, the lyrics are brutal and the singing, well the singing unfortunately falls into the production problem but that doesn’t last and dramatically improves on the second track – ‘Infinity Crisis’..but first you need to get past the monster solo on Devastator, incredible stuff.

Infinity Crisis kicks off with some pounding drumming before the dual lead guitars launch the song to its feet. The riff is catchy as hell, classic crunchy riffs. Singing dramatically improves and the solos agghh. It’s hard to find an Irish band that have a grasp of this style, but Exzeltic have it by the bucket load and these recordings still pale in comparison to their live performance. Another ranging battle of riffs and major soloing later – you have one hell a tune to get through. Raging rampage of carnage, if nothing else.

The EP closes out with a head banging ballad of world ending proportions. Now of course when we say ballad for thrash metal, we do of course mean a clean guitar intro and then open the void and jump. ‘Agent of Chaos’ is one of those frighteningly fast metal anthems that could fire itself onto any decent thrash record and still kick the other tunes asses. This is the moment on the EP where everything falls into place to deliver a 100% bonafide piece of classic music…except that one bit at 04:15, drop that tiny little guitar thing and all is well.

If you like your trash or just like all metal, Exzeltic are the band to check out as soon as you can. Normally Tickets There doesn’t do this, but we’ve included all three of their tunes below because we firmly believe this is one of the most exciting old-skool bands in Ireland at the moment…that we’ve heard.

This entry was posted on March 1, 2012 at 2:33 pm and is filed under EP Review, Hellfire()Sounds : REVIEWS, Music with tags Agent of Chaos, Devastator, Exzeltic, Ground Zero EP, Infinity Crisis, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Metallica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.