Album Review: Five Serpent's Teeth by Evile

It's 100 per cent Evile... The coltishness of youth might be fading but there’s now compositional grandeur in its place to inflect Evile’s thrash with the sort of power that might just assuage some of those still sore that ‘…Puppets’-era Metallica is long gone. Ever since their 07 debut ‘Enter The Grave’ posited Evile at the vanguard of thrash’s second coming – certainly in Britain – they’ve had the songwriting strong enough to endure the passing of trends.

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Because they’re so obviously influenced by such classic thrash acts, the standard take on this English quartet is that they’re throwbacks, a retro act for headbangers still stuck in the ’80s. But their third album suggests an alternate reading—that Evile are actually thrash classicists, intent on perfecting, not merely imitating, first-gen thrash. Sure, the songs here fetishize thrash touchstones such as tremolo picking and flashy double-kick work, but the playing is faster, cleaner and harder, while the writing is (apart from the lyrics) surprisingly sophisticated.

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Evile's guitarist Ol Drake recently said to me, presumably tongue-in-cheek: "I'm always waiting for the review that reads simply 'Shit sandwich.'" Now, with space at a premium when it comes to word count, as well as a suspicion that frugality of words often says much more than needless verbosity, few would argue that a review containing just the words 'shit' and 'sandwich' (in that order) is just too direct and devoid of qualification for most ummm... tastes. Regardless of his reasons for expecting such a grisly critique, he'll need to wait a while if Evile's third full-length, Five Serpent's Teeth, is an indication of where Huddersfield's thrash lords are headed.

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