NUCLEAR ASSAULT

NUCLEAR ASSAULT — the feisty virtuosos of yesteryear — have gone down the universally derided path of self-reanimation and present to the esteemed public the fruit of their ten-year ceiling-staring: "Third World Genocide." The album took three years to record. Unsurprisingly, over that period the already stale material managed to go completely moldy. Thin sound, weak songs. Or thin songs and weak sound — rearranging the terms doesn't change the sum. Everyone knows there are records that irritate with their incompetence, test your patience with carbon copies of the greats, or grate with inappropriately sepulchral pomposity. But NUCLEAR ASSAULT's new effort can't even provoke irritation. It's like a ringing phone from behind the next office partition — so indistinguishable from the rest of the sonic wallpaper that your brain's antennae filter it out like an annoying radio interference. Whose fault is it? The musicians'? The sound engineer's? The producer's? Unknown. What is known is this: if the old Nuclear American records — "Handle With Care," for instance — possessed an undeniable positive charge, the only plus of this fresh opus is how rhythmically it bounces off the walls of a garbage chute.