Hellbastard - Natural Order (1990)

The UK isn't exactly known for their thrash metal scene. I suppose the most known old school names were Onslaught, Sabbat and Xentrix, but then there's Hellbastard from Newcastle, England who made one ripping fast thrash metal album called, 'Natural Order' back in 1990.

Interestingly though Hellbastard are famous for coining the genre term "crust" with their 1986 demo tape, 'Ripping Crust,' and apparently the band always thought of themselves as a Crust Punk/Crossover band, but man, oh man, this is straight forward bay area thrash metal in the same vein as early Metallica, Exodus, Forbidden and Testament.

The music of Natural Order is fairly straight forward fast, relentless and aggressive thrash metal with some cool solos, catchy riffs and shouted angry vocals, which have lyrically themes around anti-religion, war, society and so on. There's also a few slower sections here and there which open the songs up for more melodic characteristics, two instrumentals that are decent and of course a few of the songs have the always kick ass backing gang vocals, which I freakin' love.

This record is by no means anything revolutionary but its fun head banging classic thrash metal just the way I like it. I mean seriously I don't need my thrash metal to sound like Master of Puppets always, it's simply not necessary, nor do I need a scholar telling me profound words of wisdom through the lyrics. I don't need a perfect production job either, it can be as dirty as a crack whores twat, but simply put this is just one of those records to throw on when you need a quick fix of raging hostile catchy thrash metal.

Natural Order unfortunately turned out to be the last album for Hellbastard, but the band joined the whole, 'lets reform our old as dirt thrash metal band' boat thing a few years ago and in 2009 they made their definitive return with a new album called, 'The Need to Kill,' which makes me curious especially since I've always enjoyed this old LP.

It would appear that at some point in time some label repressed this album on CD and if you fancy that classic bay area thrash sound you'd do well to give this one a chance if you ever come across it. If not you can just come on over to my pad and will give the LP a spin.