It’s hard to not like a band called JOE THRASHER, ain’t it? And then, a song called ‘Canadian Metal’ and another called ‘Metal Til You Puke’ (next line, of course, is “all over the stage”)? Uh, yeah, count me in. This Ottawa band delivers the metallic goods with surprisingly high quality levels here, everything from production sound (top notch) to playing ability (excellent, even if they choose to keep it stoopid most of the time) being at the big league levels. The band plays a strain of thrash that’s somewhere between Germany and Vancouver, kind of like a DESTRUCTION-lite by way of Jeff Waters filtered through, oh, classic EXCITER and some bands you and I both forgot about, but they had, like, at least an album AND a live EP (with one bonus studio track; the EP may or may not have been called Live +1) on Metal Blade in ’87. Hard to believe this one is an indie, with so much thrash revival stuff going on out there these days on big metal labels; maybe it’s that there’s more trad metal here, mainly in the gruff “melodic” vox and stomping, four on the floor anthemic choruses. I mean, check out the 1:36 ‘Leatherhead’, or the blood-pumping ‘We Are The Ones’… if you’ve got metal in your veins, this is as good as it gets, in many ways. One of the smarter larger metal labels should be sniffing around Joe Thrasher’s door soon… or at least a bigger Canadian indie could court them a bit, buy them a goddamn dinner, if there’s any justice out there.