Great Northern Whalekill

The cover art of Minus' The Great Northern Whalekill is, undoubtedly deliberately, offensive on several levels at once, but in a way that mostly just makes the offended feel slightly sorry for the perpetrator, as in "Really? That's the best possible cover art you could come up with for this record? How very sad and pathetic of you." Kind of a drag, because although the cover is indeed astonishingly lame (and even the album title, a bald-faced rip-off of a Pantera classic, is extremely naff in itself), The Great Northern Whalekill is in fact a moderately awesome piece of all-out post-hardcore thrash. One of those rare bands in the style who sacrifice neither melody nor dynamics nor lyrical intelligibility in favor of velocity and attitude, Minus manage to combine all the best parts of several types of heavy rock on this album with little of the chaff. Echoes not only of Pantera (who would be an obvious touchstone even without the namechecking of the album title), but Motörhead's punk-friendly, stripped-down speed metal and even the radio-friendly stoner rock of Queens of the Stone Age are all over songs as brutally powerful as "Rhythm Cure" and "Rip It Up" and as surprisingly melodic as "Futurist" and "Throwaway Angel." After a decade as cult favorites little known outside of their native Iceland and the international post-hardcore underground, The Great Northern Whalekill is potentially a deserved breakthrough to a wider audience. ~ Stewart Mason