Sagros - Anger Blinds The Mind

I'm starting to think that I should jump ship when it comes to thrash right now; despite getting sent some incredible pieces of work last year, I'm suddenly finding myself buried beneath a sea of crappy records in the first months of 2014. First I got Sarcasm's latest album, which was a stale reminder of everything I hate about the retro thrash sound, and now I've been given Sagros' Anger Blinds The Mind which reminds me of all the shittiness that modern thrash brings. Am I just a magnet for crap thrash albums this year? Did I miss a meeting or something? I'm going to complain the union about this, but let's just knuckle down and get this out of the way first...

Columbian thrashers Sagros have been doing the rounds since around 1998, yet this is their first full length album - all they've had since 2000 are a bunch of demos and EPs. This would usually imply that the band has had 15 years to refine their sound and that this albu mwould be a gargantuan monument to that decade and a half of songwriting, but... okay, I'm just going to come clean; Anger Blinds The Mind is fucking dull. REALLY dull. Sarcasm's level of dull. I'm usually pretty forgiving with thrash metal bands due to my extensive experience with the genre, but this really has nothing to offer thrash metal fans that they can't get everywhere else for half the price with quadruple the quality. It's immediately obvious that Sargos were shooting for a sort of modern Onslaught or Exodus sound crossed with death metal, but the end result is a lifeless and unidentifiable mess with riffs that are as bloody generic as they come - in fact, I'm pretty certain that the verse riff from the title track is directly ripped off from a few other thrash metal bands because it's so suspiciously familiar. Everything here just feels so insubstantial and bland that it's quite literally headache-inducing, with no memorable hooks and a rather overwhelming(ly bland) production job that does more to hurt than music than it does to help it. The band tries the occasional melodic thing here and there, but as with the rest of the record, it feels so unsatisfying because it's just too similar to everything else the genre could offer you at this point. Only not as good. Sagros' cover of fellow Columbian band Masacre is inferior to the already-average original too, and chucking it on the end of the album feels like kind of a cop out... if you wanted to do a cover, put it either in the middle of the album or as a bonus track. Ending an album with a cover just doesn't sit right.

There's probably enough here to appease those infamous hairy-knuckled thrash lunatics who'll like anything associated with the genre, but everyone else will find Anger Blinds The Mind really boring. I've heard albums far worse than this and it's not so unbelievably shit that absolutely nobody should ever touch it, but the curious should just download this. It's just so goddamn boring.


1. Anger Blinds The Mind
2. Inhumanity
3. Quietud Mortal
4. For Your Blood
5. Falsa Victoria
6. Once Before I Die
7. The Agony Inside
8. Asesinos
9. Wrath Intense Pain (cover Masacre)