For a twenty-four page thrash fanzine found underneath my front passenger side tire, there is a certain sentimentality to Speed Merchants volume I. Sadly the sentimentality of finding something in a completely illogical place doesn't negate the fact that this fanzine is not very in-depth, has about seventeen minutes of interesting reading and just doesn't really delve into the emerging thrash scene all that well. It's a given that Bonded By Blood, Gama Bomb, Toxic Holocaust and Evile would be included and not at all that exciting to see Municipal Waste and Merciless Death listed also. Some bands are in fact appreciated such as Dekapitator and Decadence, mainly for the fact that they are not all that well known but I'm still not won over.
The zine is written by Terrorizer journalist Ian Webster. I'm not intimately familiar with Terrorizer, probably the most trend-obsessed hard rock magazine to exist, and I'm not familiar with Mr. Webster's writing but if this little magazine is anything to go by, he is more concerned with promoting the concept of "New Wave Of Thrash Metal" than promoting really good bands. Maybe it's just me but I've listened to Evile, Municipal Waste, Fueled By Fire etc. and "generic" is a more appropriate genre tag than "thrash" for these bands. Some people like generic though. This magazine just doesn't seem to expose anything other than what someone would discover trolling the internet threads for twenty minutes. It's got a cool layout, old school vibe - other than the bands - and is a REALLY quick read... it's just so surface. It does have four pages of demo reviews also but sixteen, one page interviews with no more than five questions each doesn't allow much room for a whole lot of banter. I think the best thing about the zine is that it might be named after a Razor track...
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