Misfire – Sympathy For The Ignorant

By RingMaster Review on April 30, 2022 • ( 2 )

It is the primal instincts of thrash metal which predominantly gets our personal juices flowing like a river and so it seems equally so it is for US trio MISFIRE. The band has just unleashed their debut album and with relish and creative devilment the release proved itself to be one untamed and ferocious but skillfully crafted slab of thrash incitement.

The creation of long-time friends, guitarist/vocalist Jay Johnson and drummer James Nicademus with bassist Sean Coogan, Misfire seemingly draw on the inspiration of thrash legends such as Slayer, Exodus and Testament for their nostalgia meets new blood sound. It is a proposition which the Chicago band also infuse with Pantera-esque belligerence and Bloodsimple like ferocity, the result a trespass which takes no prisoners and left us greedy and madly grinning for more within Sympathy For The Ignorant.

Immediately commanding keen attention, the album invades first with Fractured, the track slowly winding up its proposal and predation to set the album off in calm but predatory style. As rhythms jab and guitars cast a wiry web, tension builds until it all comes to a head of sonic ferocity and vocal antagonism. Grooves are spun with dervish like franticness as rhythms land with resourceful incitement, all the while the track careering from fierce invention to impassioned eruption without losing the controlled sense of a predator.

The track sets the template for things to come if not the individuality of the songs and their aggressive incursions. The following Red Flag was under the skin in seconds, winding up body and vocal chords with its rapacious exploits and ill-intent yet a galvanic incitement calling the senses to arms while War Of Mine with a steadier gait and maybe even more devious intent offers deceitful mercy before launching its own infernal cauldron of sound and deed. Both tracks have that classic breath, and songs which feel destined to be perpetual protagonists of pleasure as the years pass by.

It is a sense which applies to the album too; its memorable and rousing persuasion only escalated as the likes of Skin Of Mirrors bullies and Death Trap terrorizes the senses with voracity and bordering on carnal enterprise. The second of the two is a barbarously swinging invasion which had its claws into favourite track in quick time, a song simultaneously hounding and grinding upon the senses for rich pleasure before No Offense stalks the listener with an appropriate smirk. Eventually it can hold back no more and erupts in a tempest of senses scything grooves and rapacious incitement, voice and rhythms as spiky as the guitars.

Adventure and invention only accompany tracks such as R.I.P. and He Said, She Said as the release deepened its hooks, the first a barbarous challenge and uproar with its successor another which initially stalks its victim before uncaging a virulence of riffs and toxic grooves within rhythmic hostility. It too makes a claim for best song springing strands of unpredictable and eventful devilry into its ferocious clamour.

Across the release you get the sense that it is presenting the same intensity, assault and passion you would expect to feel from the band on stage, L.Y.S. epitomizing that thought with its raw tone and instinctively ferocious delivery yet a cyclone of sound which does not hide the individual and united craft of the band and their imaginative revelry.

Sympathy For The Ignorant ends with its title track, a song which offers relatively calm lures compared to other tracks but only to coax the senses into its hellacious realm of twisted grooves, demented shenanigans and rhythmic pugilism.

It is an outstanding end to one glorious encounter from MISFIRE, a debut which we for one have greedily filed under should, indeed must have.

Sympathy For The Ignorant is out now via MNRK Heavy.