United – No IQ – Review

United

No IQ (Metal Blade)
by Chaz Thorndike

In my dusty yet extensive library of ’80s vinyl are 12″ platters of all the pre-Bush (so to speak) Anthrax, pre-and-post-Cliff (lost their edge?) Metallica, and more no name rock/metal/thrash records than I’d care to mention. Somewhere in there is at least one record each by Loudness and EZO. I’m not nearly curious enough to dig them out so I can compare and contrast them with United, the latest post-thrash guitar hero entourage from the Land of the Rising Sun, but I will take a moment or so out of my busy, I-am-so-progressively-alternative life to gush enthusiastically about them.

While No IQ is about as dated as an aging nympho, United has kept current with the new sounds of metal. They cleverly incorporate said sounds into a speedcore cock rock format. Imagine a hybrid of Pantera and Shout-era Mötley Crüe, then go get faced beyond thought because that is truly a frightening concept. After repeatedly listening to the disc, including the hidden, utterly useless instrumental teaser, I remain convinced, the best tracks are the first few. “Revenger” has a bridge that Megadeth could (and probably will) claim as their own, another part reminds me of Testament, and the actual chorus (or a not-especially profound pre-chorus where everyone shouts the same indecipherable phrase a bunch of times) sounds like someone, although I can’t think of who. (I probably have a few of their albums, maybe a backpatch on a faded denim jacket I lost somewhere, and I’m sure I used to scribble their lyrics on schoolbook covers, thinking them very profound and me, very bad-assed.) Ahem…

“Bad Habit” – Ah, I can’t say enough about this song. Someone played this song incredibly loud, trying to wake me up one morning. “Who is that mad guitarist?” I spat. It turned out to be the Tsunami twin powers of Shingo Ohtani and Yoshifumi Yoshida. (Insert cheap-shot play on words here, I’m still terribly traumatized by the silent “T” in Tsunami.) Ripping and roaring through powerchords, quick riffs-in-third-harmony (Kreator, anyone?), and the chant-along, pump-yer-fist pre-chorus of “I don’t care/I don’t care what you say,” while not as idealistically profound, perhaps, as “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing,” it’s a helluva lot better to slam to. Screeching solos, resplendent with whammy dive bombs and squawking with ear-splitting harmonics, soar through the middle of the song in a way I haven’t heard since the heyday of the guitar-crazed ’80s. I think they repeat the chorus, or something, again at the end. I can’t tell you, my brain keeps reeling from the solos. Some of the other songs are really good, too – contemporary stompmetal, some flashback speedcore, and powermetal anthem rock. While I openly and repeatedly despise bands that can’t seem to push themselves and the genre to new limits, United strikes a powerchord of nostalgia and does it well.