Exhumed - Necrocracy (2013)

Dear Readers: As you may have become familiar, the quest to fulfill the monumental and seemingly but not really abandoned promise of Metallica's ...And Justice For All is of especial interest to me. Albums which attempt to do so, and come within a reasonable distance of doing so are among my favorites. My favorite album of 2013, and one of my top albums of the current decade, is Exhumed's Necrocracy, wherein they suture overachieving Carcass-worship to 80's Metallica and turn their scalpels upon a totalitarian plutocracy rotting from the inside out. One area of substantial difference is the organic integration of bass gtr leads/tones, making for a dreamworld in which Cliff never died, but turned James And Lars And Kirk onto Scream Bloody Gore and Reek Of Putrefaction, now surpassing Slayer, if not Possession or future 90's Testament albums, into the thrash-unto-death sweepstakes. What is really evocative about this dream is that on the AJFA tour, James Hetfield periodically adopted a deathly growl not present on record. Necrocracy has a sick riff-atop-riff-interrupted-by-solo structure, with exactly the right thickness of gtr tone for a death-unto-thrash procedure. Honestly, this satisfies so much of what I not only want, but NEED metal to do, that when out from the library, this album dominated Subaru-based partner/kids-accompanied excursions and left only reluctantly. Blessed Be and All Hails!!!