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BIO-CANCER
Tormenting The Innocent

Candlelight (2015)
Rating: 4.5/10

Generic thrash cover? Check. Generic thrash sound? Check. And so here we have Greek thrashers Bio-Cancer. Their singer sounds like a duck, and it ruins what hope Bio-Cancer has of being a decent band.

Tormenting The Innocent is the second release from this quintet and while musically an improvement on the 2012 debut Ear Piercing Thrash, it’s just another mediocre revival thrash record that will become swallowed in the sea of similar-sounding bands, or maybe – just maybe – the Athens-based combo thought that by employing the talents of a duck they’d stand out?

Sorry, but for me the vocals are just too much of a quack to take seriously. Lefteris is probably trying to go for that Steve Souza (Exodus) style of maniacal rasp, but on this outing it just comes across as an indecipherable quack, and boy does it grate on the ears. However, if we can put this aside – and it’s very difficult to do so – we get a half-decent thrash album which most certainly offers more bite than the latest opus from Merciless Death (Taken Beyond) and a few others.

It’s still very much thrash by numbers, although played a lot faster than most and at times injecting higher doses of menace and weight too – the title track being a prime example of this ominous nature. When all is said and done, you get halfway through and just want the vocal racket to stop while also realising that there are no real standout tracks, in spite of the venomous attack executed by guitarists Thanasis and Stavros.

The gang charts are formulaic but do make a nice respite from the vocal assaults, although even for a thrash act the quacks seem out of place and better suited to a black metal opus… or a cartoon. I don’t mean to be cruel because there are positives to be taken from this frenzied album, the record speeding by at such a rate of knots that it’ll take a few spins just to latch on to certain tracks – the most memorable, if any, being ‘F(r)iends Or Fiends?’ with its impressive mid-section and the fiery ‘Boxed Out’ which is about as fast as thrash metal gets. In fact, sticksman Tomek must have lost a kilo of sweat belting this one out, but whereas thrash giants such as Exodus, Overkill and the likes have made a career out of well-crafted songs, one just feels that Bio-Cancer has put too much emphasis on speed in order to hide the inadequacies.

While thrash metal is often constructed to sound fast and furious, by the time Tormenting The Innocent has run its course (38 minutes) you won’t feel a thing and will happily move on to your next chore in life. While the instrumental cut ‘Haters Gonna… Suffer!’ may be a swipe at the detractors like myself, I feel that I have indeed suffered enough with those dreadful squawks and I feel for any other innocent soul who suffers such torment.

Neil Arnold

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