It's not often that we at BluesBunny venture into metal's seedy lair. In "Home Of The Slave", St. Louis screamers Social Slave have created a well crafted thrash metal album.
All the expected metal clichés are present. From the rasping vocals to the crashing cymbals, Social Slave's sound is best likened to modern day Machine Head. The use of both clean and growling vocals on the album opener "Hypnotic" complements the crushing guitars nicely, although the lyrics are hardly poetry. Following that is the hilariously titled "Day Dreams (Of an Ugly Duckling), possibly the best track on the album. "Miracle" is a progressive slab of metal that seems to get oddly philosophical halfway through.
"Sanguinary Thoughts" is an example of the band trying their hand at serious songwriting, and not really succeeding. While I'm not saying that metal band are flat-out incapable of writing memorable lyrics, all too often lyrics are lost on the majority of their listeners, whose heads are flailing wildly in the breeze. The album ends with a surprise. "Fat Girl Song" sounds like the band have gone mellow and traded in their distortion pedals for acoustic guitars. For about five seconds that is. What follows, is two and a half minutes of verbal loving of the well padded lady mixed into a rich stew of power chords.
Metal heads and Goths are outcasts in society for a reason; their taste in music stinks. As such, Social Slave will never be accepted in the mainstream. Rest assured though, this band has every other quality necessary to become a thrash metal juggernaut. We kind of liked this album actually but we are certainly not going to admit to that in open court.