By Greg Pratt

It's tough to put into words the sheer joy that the thrash attack that is Sacrifice's comeback album, The Ones I Condemn, put into my sleep-deprived and over-stimulated noggin'. I mean, this shit rules. Big time. No idea how they did it, but they came back after 16 years and laid down an album that is 'for real', right up there with the best of their work. Unreal. If I hadn't heard this after compiling my year-end lists, this would probably be placed firmly on top. Straight-up, flat-out: this shit rules.

Uh, so I like it; now that that's out of the way, it's time to touch base with the band and see how they're feeling about their return to form (which, honestly, makes any of the Big Four's "return to form"s a joke). As it turns out, they're loving it, too.

"I'm really happy with it," says vocalist/guitarist Rob Urbinati. "When we got out of the studio, I listened to it non-stop for months. There's nothing that was coming out that I could replace it with. Something new would come out and I'd get it and play three songs and say, 'Nah, I'm gonna put this back on' (laughs). It's hard to be objective about your own material but when that happens you really feel like you have something special."

Urbinati says that getting back into the song-writing groove wasn't always the smoothest ride, but the band quickly learned to take advantage of inspiration when it was there.

"When an idea hit, the song wrote itself really quick," he says. "But those moments, they didn't happen every day. When they did happen, we just ran with it and it turned out really good. We were really focused on this stuff. It wasn't like we had a side project here, a side project there, this going on over in this corner, that kinda thing. We were focused on doing this album, and it worked out well that way."

Focus: listening to the disc, it's obviously the work of four very focused individuals. Considering that these are grown men crafting these tunes, as opposed to the bright-eyed pups that put together those classic thrash albums of yesteryear, it's impressive that they found their groove again so fast.

"Our lives are busier, yes," says Urbinati. "But it almost feels like when we first got together and were first writing for our first album. There's no pressure. We're basically doing this because we love to do it. We got a couple songs together and thought, Wow, these are really good, let's keep going. There's no pressure from anybody, from fans, from ourselves, we're just doing it to have fun, to challenge ourselves and write the best songs we can, and that was it. In some ways it was easier to write than, say, Soldiers Of Misfortune (laughs). Just the fact that we felt like kids again doing this stuff."

And, although a tongue-in-cheek nostalgia trip this resolutely is not (compare this next to some of the new wave of thrash albums and feel the embarrassment), the band was writing with the old school in mind, as it's an era they obviously feel very strongly about.

"The direction we wanted to go in was early thrash, the stuff that we started out writing, Torment In Fire, Forward To Termination era," says Urbinati. "When there was stuff like DARK ANGEL and SLAYER, before thrash was polluted with money. It's the stuff that would go on to maybe influence death metal later, where there wasn't this line drawn, where this is thrash, this is death metal, whatever. It was raw and aggressive; thrash metal really stopped being fast and aggressive after a while. I think that's why it died. We wanted to go back to those days when it wasn't about money, it was just about a new style of music and you just wanted to be as heavy and aggressive as possible."

With all this talk of heavy and aggressive, it might strike some metalheads as odd that the record (originally released on ultra-indie Marquee Records from Brazil) is seeing the light of domestic day through Sonic Unyon, who are more known for melodic indie fare. But, as Urbinati reminds us, times are changing at the Unyon (as one browse through their surprisingly metal-focused site confirms).

"You know, there are metal guys at the label," laughs Urbinati. "They've been great with us, they've been getting us great press, they've got great distribution in Canada. The label's been behind us 100%. I have absolutely no complaints about them. And they do distribute Nuclear Blast, and do VOIVOD and AUGURY so it's not like they're metal-less there; there's quite a bit of metal on the roster."

And with that, we go forth, a nation of heads banging mightily, if not a bit wearily after eight or nine songs, because, well, Sacrifice's fan base ain't exactly getting any younger. Neither are the guys in the band, which is a main reason they, unfortunately (but, perhaps for the best), won't be doing this full-time.

"No, definitely not going full-on," says Urbinati. "We're doing this solely because we love to do it. Playing thrash metal is a young guy's game, we're 42 years old here. This isn't a career option at this point in our lives (laughs). Tops, we might have a five-year window before we start falling apart."
"I don't want to get to the point where we're going out on stage and people are saying, 'They shouldn't be here anymore, they sound like crap,'" he continues. "I don't want to release an album where people are going to say, 'This doesn't measure up.' We'll know when it's time to stop and hopefully that's not for a while."

And when it comes down to it, all this thrashing is actually for pretty innocent reasons, reasons that have got buds together in the jam room since the dawn of amps and beer.

"We all live so far away from each other," says Urbinati on why it really rules to be doing Sacrifice again. "It's amazing for all four of us to get back together again once in a while and see each other and catch up."

Maybe that's why this new Sacrifice album sounds so damn good it's guys who can play the shit out of their instruments not trying too hard because they have nothing left to prove; they're into hanging out and writing old thrash tunes like the kind they wrote back in the day. But with tunes this good, these guys are making today just as good as yesterday, and for veteran metalheads, that's truly something worth banging thy head even past song nine to.