Exodus

Exhibit B: The Human Condition (Nuclear Blast)
By Mike Delano

Exodus has never been a band for subtlety (“Shroud of Urine,” “Sealed with a Fist,” not to mention what they said they’d do to your wife in 1985) or brevity (they like to let their thrash stretch out and stay awhile, running times and momentum be damned). So it’s no surprise that their new album runs a cool 74 minutes and piles on the hate anthems like “March of the Sycophants” and the quite appropriate “Class Dismissed (A Hate Primer).” That Exhibit B: The Human Condition delivers reliably tight, brutal thrash is a given, but what makes it especially memorable is that, as the album title makes clear, they’ve set their sights on a grand subject worthy of their musical excess. Nothing living or breathing is beyond their scorn this time around, whether they’re stepping into the shoes of a school shooter, explicitly detailing “malevolent and rancid perversions” in Northern California, or giving you a blow-by-blow account of the Rape of Nanking. By the time all of this fun is over, they’re happily waiting for this “cesspool in orbit” to be burnt out of the sky. With the earth now in flames, Exhibit C has a lot to live up to.
(www.nuclearblast.com)