format: LP
year: 1993
country: Russia
label: Ritonis
#: SP02-0021
info: Large folded insert w/ pic + lyrics
style: Thrash Metal
Side A:
One of the Big 5 in Soviet/post-Soviet Metal vinyl mega-rarities and a frequent want list topper among Thrash collectors in general is Russians ASPID's one and only LP from 1993. And for fairly good reasons I'd say. Most importantly (duh!) it has a dragon on the cover, which is almost as pretty as fellow top-Rus-rari-cousin VARVAR. Musically they're not really comparable though, as Aspid it Total Thrash with a HUGE pair of uppercase T's. This consistent no-fucking-about approach to their style of choice is probably another reason for their popularity. There is not one single 'traditional Metal' riff on the entire album and frankly, there are A LOT of riffs. It is also surprisingly tight & well produced considering its semi-exotic origin of Rostov, southern Russia.
I'm reluctant to use the obvious 'Progressive Thrash' or 'Techno-Thrash' descriptors here because in my world they're not weird & annoying enough for the former nor boring & wimpy enough for the latter ...but yeah, maybe somewhere inbetween those two pillars is where some would put them. It's occationally pretty brutal stuff and I know some reviewers have compared them to later Death-material, but it's only really in the ultra-fast passages of "Where The Night Is" that they embrace the DM genre. It's a difficult album to dissect track by track since there's so many tempo changes and different parts in each track that the whole album melds together into one great symphony of relentless, thrashing rage. Sometimes this seamless phenomenon can be a bad thing, but in the case of more intense and brutal material like that of Aspid it's really not a problem. If I were to pick some favourite chapters, it would be the creepy-crawly Lovecraftian doom-thrash monstrosity "Give Me (a ballet piece)", the aforementioned "Where The Night Is" which apart from the speedy bits also includes their jazziest/Voivod'est ideas, and last but not least "Hey You" for being the shortest, snappiest and best constructed semi-prog-Thrash piece of the album.
A number of reissues, remasters, fan-remixes, bootlegs and even bootlegs of reissues(!) of "Кровоизлияние" have been
produced through the years, but should you belong to the original-or-bust club of Metal collectors, there is probably no other Russian Metal vinyl that will set you back more than this one.