W.I.P. Guide/Primer to Technical/Progressive Thrash Metal
This is a feeble attempt at a guide into what is probably my favourite genre of music that I will fanboy and nerd over as much as humanly possible and socially acceptable. I'll try to write this in a similar style to Ride Into Glory's guides on Epic Heavy Metal and USPM that are absolutely fantastic and I cannot recommend them enough if you're even slightly interested into trad metal. Obviously I can only dream to achieve that level of quality but here goes anyway.
THE MECHANICAL TRINITY
side note: my placeholder name, noone calls them that
The Mechanical Trinity consists of the three bands I feel had the largest impact on the genre (as well as prog metal and thrash in general), these bands have gone above and beyond to push thrash metal to it's weirdest limits. They are naturally: Coroner, Voivod and Watchtower
Watchtower
Watchtower were the first to start exploring this odd territory, mixing prog instrumentation with the aggression and heavy sound of thrash metal as well as powerful soaring vocals most likely inspired by those of trad metal acts like Fates Warning and Queensryche. It is amazing how their debut album Energetic Disassembly was released as early as February 1985. February. 1985. Thrash at that point was still firmly rooted in speed metal and NWOBHM and, although it would very sharply evolve throughout the course of that same year, nothing this technical had been done in metal yet and wouldn't even be done until quite some time later with the beginning of extreme metal. It is insane to me how just a couple of lads from Texas could make something so far ahead of their time and on top of that have it be mostly unknown to most of today's metal masses. It does however suffer from one very severe issue that likely dragged them down - production . I assume the production is a byproduct of them being so far ahead, how do you produce an album in a style like this when noone was playing anything similar? The guitars are drowned out by the loud bass and 8-bit sounding drums (something that has grown on me a lot and has a charming effect now but could be off-putting to newcomers) as well as Jason McMaster's vocal performance being at the front throughout quite a large part of the record. Now, while *I* feel like the songs are fairly catchy and never really bore me, I do realize that alongside the production the odd riffing and for a lot of people obnoxious vocal performance can wear their experience down. Their sophomore album, and my personal recommendation for a starting point with the band, was released in 1989, entitled Control and Resistance, and improved drastically the production issues of their debut as well as putting even more emphasis on progression and technicality. This band would have a massive impact on technical death metal as well with Chuck Shuldiner from Death citing them as one of his favourites and I don't doubt that other bands in tech-death and prog metal have cited them as a huge influence. Sadly the band would break up in 1990 following a hand injury to guitarist Ron Jarzombek and never really do much outside a 2016 EP that was met with high praise.
Recommended starting point: Control and Resistance [1989], and afterwards Energetic Disassembly [1985]
Voivod
Voivod
Recommended Starting point: Killing Technology (more raw and thrashy) or Dimension Hatröss (more clean and technical/progressive), and afterwards Nothingface (almost no thrash but still very important and technical), Target Earth, Post Society (note: yt tracklisting is wrong?) and The Wake