Horrorscope

Overkill's "Horrorscope" from the 1991 album of the same name demonstrates the New Jersey band's ability to combine thrash metal velocity with song-writing sophistication that many of their contemporaries traded away in pursuit of pure aggression. The production is dense but internally coherent — Bobby Gustafson's successor D.D. Verni and the guitar duo of Bobby Blitz Ellsworth's band-mates create a wall of sound that has genuine dynamics, peaks and valleys that prevent the relentlessness from becoming monotonous. Blitz's vocal performance on this album is one of his best — a shrieking, elastic instrument that can drop to a conspiratorial near-whisper before launching into one of thrash metal's most recognizable high screams. The guitar riff at the core of "Horrorscope" has a mechanical, lurching quality that suggests something inhuman in its precise repetition, perfectly matched to lyrics that explore the paranoid, conspiratorial territory the title implies — fate as trap, the stars as malevolent architects of human suffering. The song has a cinematic quality unusual in the genre, a sense of building dread rather than immediate detonation. Overkill were often overshadowed by the Big Four but "Horrorscope" demonstrates why their catalog has survived: they were writing metal songs with genuine structural intelligence while maintaining the genre's essential ferocity.