Exodus - Goliath
- Jay
- 32 minutes ago
- 3 min read
FOR FANS OF: OVERKILL, RAZOR, PANTERA
🌐 BANDCAMP | METAL-ARCHIVES | RYM
THRASH-O-METER
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ SONGWRITING
★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ LONGEVITY
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ THEMES
★★★★★★★☆☆☆ PRODUCTION
★★★★★★★☆☆☆ MUSICIANSHIP
★★★★★★★☆☆☆ CHARACTER
★★★★★★★☆☆☆ THRASHABILITY
When you started in the 80s and you’re now dozen albums deep, the question becomes hard to avoid: how much is there really left to say?
Longtime vocalist Souza exits, ex-vocalist Dukes returns. That's the buzz. Well, and the fact that its a new bloody Exodus album! Hard to get much more old school than these fellas when you're talking about thrash metal.
The vocalist shift swaps sly venom for fury. Rob Dukes' return ends up being one of the album’s most intriguing aspects, adding heft and surprisingly welcome reach to its themes of unease, dystopia and intergalactic violence.
Dukes done good here
Promise You This feels like a genuine poot of fresh air - light on its feet, fun in its bones and melodic without sounding like its reaching. It feels to me the fellas have fun playing this one and to tell the truth I wasn't feelin' the album at all before this one hit.
Counting back from that the album trips over a collab detour, yawns with a caricature called Hostis Humani Generis, and 3111... man, an opener that spends... what, nearly two minutes cycling alternating intro notes to set the mood. On an album, sure, I mean why the Hell not, right? But, anecdotally, this was also their first single release. The fnck?
It’s a slightly different beast this time: not a blur of motion but a hulking force that wreaks havoc simply by shifting its weight. Not that the album is some mid-tempo trudge, but plenty of these songs do channel a kind of brutish, lumbering force. Fittingly enough, the album's title and cover art say as much!
There's life in this old beast yet!
Maybe its because of this hulking theme that the guitars crunch with a sizzling rasp that veer dangerously close to the religion that is the HM-2 sound - a kind of evil and overwhelming snarl that's usually prevalent with death metal from the (un)holy land of meatballs.
Anyhoo! There's something uncooked about them guitars here but to balance that I friggin' love how the bass is gloriously right in your face and the drums pack a dynamic punch. There's a vision here for this thing for sure!
The eight-minute beast Summon of the God Unknown deserves special mentioning mostly due to the fact that more than any other track it gets to the heart of what the album is all about: thick, swaggering southern metal pulse with groove, stomp and menace, which conjures Pantera and Black Label Society vibes here and there. Sure, the title track Goliath carries the same DNA but its a bit of an tryhard - this one lays it bare.
Lenghtwise 'Goliath' is a hulking thrash metal record - though Exodus have served up monsters before. Holt’s songwriting domain has long since been thoroughly mapped, for better and worse, but here a number of moves will wrong-foot the listener - but maybe that's a good thing? At this stage experimentation is natural only that on the album level some of these detours feel superfluous and don't exactly add to the momentum.
Good sh!t
