Their recent set supporting Roadsaw and House of Broken Promises at the Trash Bar in Brooklyn (Alkahest opened) was my first experience with New York trio Thinning the Herd. I’d seen the name around, but never actually heard the band, and once I did that, buying their 2009 Devil Mask EP was unavoidable. Sometimes these things just happen.

Pepper Keenan-era C.O.C. is a good point of reference for a song like “Philistine,” but Devil Mask opener “Won’t Abide” is all Iommi, and specifically the Iommi solo record or Sabbath‘s Dehumanizer in terms of tone. The guitars are spot on. “Kitchen Sink” has a more Judas Priestly vibe, but the trio — Gavin, Rich and Dan on the disc — have a pretty clear idea where their doom comes from, and it comes from Birmingham.

What interests me most about Devil Mask, though, isn’t the guitar or the voting-with-a-bullet vocals, it’s the drums. It’s amazing, but if you go back in the annals of metal history, you’ll see even more than makeup, hair-size and jean-tightness, the eras are marked by drum sounds, and the feel of Thinning the Herd‘s kit for “Won’t Abide” and the biker-doomly “Uninformed” (the only song on Devil Mask that’s not available for hearing on the band’s MySpace) is metallic classicism through and through. Not something you hear every day, especially in New York, especially on a weeknight. Was a cool surprise and easily worth the purchase price for the EP.

Tags: New York, New York City, Thinning the Herd, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Buried Treasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.