From that interstitial and liminal period between speed metal and death metal, bands like Possessed and Merciless emerged long ago, but the tradition carries on with high-speed contrast and vertigo from Ripper.

Frenzied riffing fits in mostly circular songs with layers and lots of breaks between transitional riffs that do not so much temporize as offer precipices between inertia and radical change, giving the sense of an unfolding topography where the expected becomes the alien and the oppositional subsumes the norm.

Speed metal fanatics will find too much tremolo picking, and death metal fanatics too much bounce, but in the end, this album delivers straightforward metal anticipation and inversion of the normal, delivering a surreal world of conflict and usurpation.

Tags: ripper, Speed Metal