OneMetal.com REVIEW:
Exodus – Exhibit B: The Human Condition

Exhibit B: The Human Condition, Exodus’ 10th full-length album in 25 years, starts and ends with brief, gentle, mellow classical guitar picking passages. Listeners who are more faint-of-heart will be excessively glad of those short pastoral reprieves, since the entire rest of the album’s 1 hour, 13 minute running time sees the Bay Area thrash metal legends in a full-on, face-ripping, toxic-waltzing frenzy. Rob Dukes’ snarling delivery of lyrics focused entirely on the atrocities man commits against man, Lee Altus and Gary Holt’s breakneck riffage deployed with that distinctive, gravelly-yet-razor sharp tone, Tom Hunting’s frantic skin-bashing and Jack Gibson’s ringing basstones are all deployed with a passion and intensity that would seem incredible coming from a band fifteen years Exodus’ junior, let alone a grizzled group of veterans like these guys.

Originally formed in 1981, Exodus pretty much started out as the reigning kings of the Bay Area thrash metal scene – that is, until a bunch of mouthy young upstarts named Metallica (whose lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was a founding member of Exodus) released a little-known platter named Kill ‘Em All and unceremoniously tipped Exodus from their thrash metal throne. After a career marked mainly by albums of inconsistent quality and frequent lineup changes, Exodus since 2004 seem to be on a mission to reestablish themselves as a force to be reckoned with – and Exhibit B is another convincing argument for their case.

The guitar duo of founding member Gary Holt and Lee Altus are expert at melding crunching, lead-heavy riffage with fleet-fingered, catchy licks and shredding solos – check out the frantic, flesh-stripping fury of album highlight ‘Class Dismissed (A Hate Primer)’, which sees Dukes shrieking from the perspective of a high-school shooter while the Altus/Holt guitar duo fire salvos of machine-gun palm-muted riffage and bludgeoning chord progressions. See also ‘Downfall’, a track that shows that Exodus circa 2010 can let fly some maddeningly catchy, melodic, yet still savage riffage with some nimble fretwork that sounds like Gothenberg-esque melodic death metal set on fire and shot from a blunderbuss. Elsewhere, the (relatively) slower-paced ‘Nanking’ spends its 7:20 running time stomping the listener underfoot, briefly recalling Slayer’s ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ (the track, not the album) with a short Eastern-sounding clean guitar passage before determinedly hammering the listener with pummelling riffage.

The production, handled by revered knob-twiddler Andy Sneap, is as weighty and pristine as you’d expect from Backstage studios – retaining Exodus’ distinctive guitar tone and the high-mid, cutting twang of Gibson’s bass and framing them within a forceful, go-for-the-throat mix that seems to scream aggression from the rooftops. Indeed, if there’s a significant criticism of Exhibit B, it’s that the pace is so relentless and the fury so unrelenting, that the album’s CD-stretching running length of 1 hour, 13 minutes becomes positively exhausting. A lot of the songs run to over 6 minutes in length, with ‘The Sun Is My Destroyer’ topping out at an epic 9:21 – but for the most part, you’ll be too busy headbanging and air guitaring along to notice. Fatigue can set in two-thirds of way through, however – after the rousing carpet-bombing run that is ‘Burn, Hollywood, Burn’, the band seem to have somewhat shot their wad. Despite this, however, Exhibit B remains one of the most exhiliratingly unhinged, furious thrash records of recent memory.

Exodus’ MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/exodus
Nuclear Blast’s Website: http://www.nuclearblast.de

Bottom Line

Unrelentingly aggressive, chock-full of air-guitar inspiring riffs and heavy as hell, Exhibit B is a slightly overlong, yet otherwise near-essential album for thrash metal afficianados.