MASSACRA

After a mostly thrash-oriented debut, these Frenchmen finally decided to play death metal. Thrash elements are certainly present here, but there are far fewer of them than on the band's debut record. The music overall has become darker, angrier, and more measured. The rhythmic transitions this time sound precise and clear — the album was simply mixed much better, and the musicians' technical level has risen many times over. The sound turned out much denser and more saturated overall; there's none of that sense of insufficiency and incompleteness that arises when listening to the band's first disc, "Final Holocaust." In other words, "Enjoy the Violence" is in every respect a more mature, higher-quality, and fully realized work. There is a flip side to this, however, because in achieving this level the band joins the enormous ranks of already established death metal groups, and the demands placed upon them increase accordingly. If the first album could be evaluated as a virtually unique phenomenon on the French scene, this disc we inevitably compare with the works of masters active during precisely this period — and we're talking about 1991. Does MASSACRA look impressive against that backdrop? The answer is unequivocally yes, perhaps precisely because they don't try to copy the Florida or Swedish sound, but rather — much like their neighbors from the Netherlands during the same period — they attempt to give us their own interpretation of death metal, with a fairly clean sound, melodic riffs, and a quite original overall atmosphere. The vocals deserve special mention, namely the tremendous progress since the first album, caused — as funny as it may sound — by a change of vocalist. Fred Duval, the guitarist and band founder, sings on only three songs, whereas on the first album he performed all vocal parts; the remaining seven songs on "Enjoy the Violence" were performed by Pascal Jorgensen. In addition to the 10 album tracks, this reissue also includes 5 rehearsal tracks from 1991 and 2 recordings made during a 1995 concert.