Bristolian thrashers Onslaught; Looking back, I don’t think they ever quite got the kudos they deserved from the thrash cognoscenti in the UK; They didn’t always help themselves, of course, often seeming to be a half step behind the bandwagon as they struggled to attain parity of respect from their homeland with the interlopers from the US and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Add to that a propensity for ‘the gimmick’, especially when they were signed to UK label Music For Nations, and the memory builds into a received wisdom – Onslaught may well have been the nearly men of thrash metal…

And now, listening to this roundup of re-recorded old chestnuts (disc one) and covers of the heroes of their formative days (disc two), it’s easy to see how those opinions formed back in the day. Disc one charts the band’s progress from the Discharge wannabeisms of Power From Hell, through the Slayer wannabeisms of The Force to the Metallica wannabeisms of the final outing of their first period, In Search of Sanity. However, it also proves that, for all their dependence on outside influence, Onslaught were a damn good band who recorded three major albums in half a decade at a record rate of musical improvement over the period. Onslaught literally did their growing up in public, and you can see the evidence here from track one, the crusty Thermonuclear Devastation of the Planet Earth, to the epic power metal of Shellshock, the closing track of Disc One. By the time they imploded in 1989, against all the odds, Onslaught had beaten off the UK competition and were ready to be mentioned in the same breath as their heroes from across the Atlantic…

Talking of heroes, Disc Two shows you just what went into the composition of the Onslaught sound; A heft dash of Discharge for sure, but also more melodic punk like the UK Subs and the street punk ‘charms’ of GBH and The Exploited. The band’s cover of Watie and company’s UK 82 is the absolute highlight of this collection, something that can’t be said about the bemusing dismemberment of Judas Priest‘s Freewheel Burning which is also included…

The re-recordings of original material play like a very good Onslaught live set, with a feeling of uniformity given to the tracks that has obviously only existed on live recordings before. Thrash Til The Death and the band’s semi-eponymous anthem Power From Hell fare particularly well but every track is delivered with power and zest and, if you’re a newcomer to the band then it serves as a perfect introduction to the undoubted joys of the Onslaught canon. And if you’re a long term Onslaughtist, well, I guess you’d want this for the collection if nothing else. Some interesting curios are to be found here for sure, but, given the upturn in form shown on the band’s last album, Generation Antichrist, I’m more excited about what’s coming best than remembering what happened in the past…

Origins of Aggression releases on May 23rd.