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MERCAPTAN
Social Injustice

Mercaptan Recordings (2024)
Rating: 6.5/10

Being primarily the creation of Kovacs Zoltan, Mercaptan is a four-year-old band from Romania that is doing what so many bands did between 1983 and 1992, and that’s rip off Metallica. Believe me, if you’ve been fed up with Metallica pretending to be thrash for a few years then you might want to snap up what sounds like rough, unreleased mixes of …And Justice For All (1988).

From the James Hetfield-like vocals to the crunchy layers this is Metallica and it’s quite entertaining. The vocals are too high in the mix so those Hetfield yaps sound frazzled by the mic, but when ‘The Beginning Of My End’ kicks things off you can’t help but laugh at the mimicry. Having said that, this is still catchy thrash metal that revels in a mid-tempo seriousness. In fact, it’s quite rare for Mercaptan’s sophomore outing to go beyond the hefty trudging which at times, just like Metallica’s creations, become a bit of a bore. ‘Solitary Exasperation’, especially, and the traipsing ‘Sorrow Land’ among many others plod and chug effectively, but it’s not until closer ‘Perfidy’ that any sort of pace is applied.

My guess is that Kovacs got into Metallica just as I started to go off them and by the time the “black” album hit he was no doubt nodding along to the life-changing plods of ‘Enter Sandman’. This is extremely derivative metal, but it’s nothing UK act Evile hasn’t done and somehow they got popular! Of the nine tracks the one I became fond of most was ‘4 = 5’, a rather raw, snarling mid-tempo chugger that actually steps away from the Metallica worship. Compelling in its aping, Social Injustice should, in theory, get a lower rating… but I quite like it.

Neil Arnold

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