Age Of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade

It’s metal migraine time down on the farm again and lemme tell ya, kiddies, nobody delivers a skull-crushing good time like Pro-Pain. These NYC hardcore punters have been delivering the goods for nigh onto a decade-and-a-half, give or take a busted eardrum or two, and with Age of Tyranny, the band’s tenth studio album, Pro-Pain puts any rumors of their early retirement to bed with a blistering lyrical attack on “King” George and the entire Bush administration. Needless to say – tho’ I’ll say it anyway – the band backs up its fighting words with music as brutal as the business end of a pair o’ brass knuckles in a dark alley.

Besides being the band’s tenth album and their fifteenth anniversary, Age of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade is also an honest-to-whatever-deity-you-fear “concept” album. No worries, though, ‘cause the guys aren’t about to go “prog” and trade in their steel-toed boots and stacks-o-amps for Earth™ shoes and synthesizers anytime soon. With this album and these songs, Pro-Pain hope to draw an analogy between President Bush’s misguided “War On Terrorism” and the historical (Christian) Crusades. As singer Gary Meskil explains, “it is believed by many that our leaders are rushing us to Armageddon via a self-fulfilling prophecy which deviously mirrors that of Biblical Prophecy, and that rapture-ready Christianity remains complicit for obvious reasons. These are terrible yet interesting times.”

That’s some lofty premise, and Age of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade delivers in spades. Patterned after the same sort of high-voltage bile that Pro-Pain cranked out with 2005’s hard-knocks LP Prophets of Doom, songs like “The New Reality,” “Iraqnam” and “Impeach, Indict, Imprison” evince a certain heavy metal radicalism. The band enlists the efforts of Icarus Witch’s Matt Bizilia on the dark-hued “Beyond The Pale,” his arcane, ethereal vox adding an otherworldly sonic vibe to the song’s esoteric bludgeoning.

Taken altogether, these songs engage in dangerous, riot-inciting, downright seditious wordplay that nevertheless deserves to be heard, venomous vocals backed by some of the hardest, most incendiary of hardcore-tinged, thrash-loving, heavy fucking metal this side of the nightmare jams of Northern Europe. Age Of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade may not win many converts, but it might open the eyes of some bright young metal fan ready to do their “patriotic duty” and dissuade them from enlisting in King George’s endless war-machine. With this album, Pro-Pain has come full-stride, earning their reputation as “the thinking man’s heavy metal band” with a brace of intelligent songs guaranteed to tickle your intellect while they bash your brain cells into submission. (Candlelight Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Age Of Tyranny from Amazon.com)