Don’t look now, but there’s a thrash revival going on somewhere in the middle distance. Chugging riffs, a trace of NWOBHM melody spliced with punky energy, yelled and barked vocals, gang choruses, squealing solos, breakneck drumming – man, some of these guys are even bringing back the old white sneakers, shades and skin-tight denim and leather uniforms. Some of this stuff is rather good; some of it isn’t.

This is where Bonded By Blood comes in. A young (teenage, I believe) Californian quintet with a name that pays homage to one of the most essential thrash albums ever, they’ve chosen some pretty big sneakers to fill. And they need to try harder next time.

It feels mean-spirited to pick on a novice band’s first, self-produced EP, but that’s all I have at hand, and that’s what I’m going to run with. The first problem with this EP is that, despite including 6 tracks (including a jokey bonus thrashing-up of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song – hmm, d’you think they watched those cartoons after school every day, or just caught the trashy remake movie?), there’s a severe under-development of material. The whole thing feels rather insubstantial – a padded-out single, at best. In fact, I’d suggest just listening to ‘Feed The Beast’, about the best song here, and leaving it at that. There’s too much half-baked filler, and not enough solid material to balance it out. Most of the music is extremely predictable; plagued with dodgy pacing and solos that aren’t nearly as good as the guitarist thinks they are. Some of these ideas are just too juvenile to bother with, even if they’re meant as humour. The biggest drawback, however, is the singer, who winds up caricaturing what he’s trying to emulate. He has moments, but eventually starts to grate. Zetro never grated, even when he wasn’t much older than this guy. The songs seem to improve a bit as the EP progresses, but a lot of the goodwill has already been lost by then. This stuff is fun, but that’s about it. If every high school in the world had to have a thrash band, I imagine many of them would sound exactly like this.

Back in the 80s, a lot of bands released demos or even entire albums before they were really ready to. Some of them went on to clean up their act and gain some traction. Others vanished without a trace. Bonded By Blood’s follow-up is going to have to be pretty crushing to convince me they can deliver the goods.