Who loves them some Exodus? Hands up, now. Ah, most of you, good. Well, I bet that you don’t love them half as much as Bonded By Blood do, a bunch of young Californians that bore such a love for the Thrash veterans that they named their band after the Bay Area legends’ first album. Listening to Feed The Beast is an oddly depressing experience, not least because if you’re at all familiar with Thrash Metal you’ll have heard the music contained within – all fifty minutes of it – before, over and over again. And again. And again. And again. So, it kind of goes without saying that you should take a deep breath before entering Bonded By Blood territory, since it’s basically a stroll through the record collection of the members, the Anthraxy and ever so slightly overlong title track, the Slayerised Psychotic Pulse, the Kreator meets The Haunted speed of Necropsy ... of course, the spectre of Exodus watches over this album like the ghost of Thrashmas past, and runs through Feed The Beast unashamedly.

It’s well-played, this album, but when you’re on a Metal label as big as Earache that’s a given. The widdly guitars especially are a highlight, the soloing sure to impress, and pretty much every song has one of those HELL YEAH TRASH METAL moments that the classic albums of the genre, like Sepultura’s Beneath The Remains, managed to be full to the brim of. So why bother listening to Feed The Beast, when the classics basically have perfected the style, and even modern pretenders to the throne like Hexen and Gama Bomb make Thrash that’s good enough for everyone?

It depends on your taste in Metal, but if you’re one of Bonded By Blood’s target audience of Thrashers, the answer, of course, lies in the Thrasherisation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme. Inserting the Tetris theme into a solo, fine, but covering cartoons in an attempt to get the resulting 80s cool for your retro album? If you live, breathe, eat, sleep and vomit Thrash then chances are you’ll love this, but I associate this kind of thing more with joke bands like Bowling For Soup (remember them?) and whilst I liked the cartoon as much as the next kid way back when, expecting me to sit and listen to a band’s ‘fun’ and ‘wacky’ reinterpretation of it is too much.

The trouble with Feed The Beast ultimately is that it trades too much on the ‘new wave of Thrash’ movement of late, without containing enough good songs to make it stand out. Fine, few of the songs here are actually bad, but even fewer are worth listening to more than once or twice... next time you want some Thrash, this may feed the beast, but it won’t satisfy it – unless you’re easily entertained, of course, in which case feel free to rock out whilst the rest of us stand and watch bemusedly, wondering when in the hell this Thrasholution is going to produce something mildly original.