DESTRUCTION – Born To Thrash (Live In Germany)

Destruction presses their home-field advantage on their newest live offering Born To Thrash (Live in Germany), wasting little time in trying to dent skulls with opener “Curse The Gods”.  They scarcely give the crowd a chance to catch their breath and clear the wounded from the moshpit for lashing out with “Nailed To The Cross”, a song Schmier clearly delights in singing, judging from his gleefully shrill delivery of the chorus.

Opening the album with “Curse The Gods” and “Nailed To The Cross” is interesting primarily because of how unsurprising those choices are as openers. Destruction has been opening their shows with those two songs–the first from their second album, 1986’s Eternal Devastation, the second from 2001’s The Antichrist, for nearly twenty years, and they have appeared as the first two tracks in their four live releases prior to Born to Thrash. Newer material for later in the set; the two cuts from 2019’s studio release Born To Perish, the title track and “Betrayal” are in the number three and number six positions, respectively. Fully half of the ten songs are drawn from Destruction’s pre-1990 catalogue; the remainder are drawn from just three of the band’s nine studio albums released since 2000.

Born To Thrash, then, isn’t exactly a career retrospective, and nor is it a showcase for a legendary band’s newest material. The release instead shows a band who thoroughly understands their strengths and delivers them in the most proficient, effective manner possible. Schmier and his cohorts have taken the roughly forty-year history and output of the band and melted it down to it’s purest essence, and then forged that essence into a hammer which they wield with deadly, bone-crunching accuracy. Planting the mini-epic “Life Without Sense” in the centre of the setlist and following it up with three of the shortest songs in the sense is indicative of how well Destruction understand how to control the tempo and mood of the crowd, not only in an individual track but over the length of an entire performance; by the time they get to the crowd-pleasing closer “Bestial Invasion”, the listener is on an adrenaline high that will last long after the buzzing riffs subside.

Born To Thrash does an exceptional job of putting the listener at the centre of a live Destruction experience; there are no weak or dragging tracks and the newer cuts stand shoulder to shoulder with the recognized classics.