TRACK LISTING

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1.  Tiny Minds
2.  Right to Lie
3.  Burning Bridges
4.  No Law
5.  Sludge
6.  Tunnel Vision
7.  Meet Your Maker (Bonus Track)
8.  Save Us (Bonus Track)
9.  Beat the System (Bonus Track)
10.  Living Hell (Bonus Track)
11.  Right to Lie (Bonus Track)
12.  Profits of Doom (Bonus Track)
13.  Tiny Minds (Bonus Track)
14.  No Law (Bonus Track)

Total playing time:  66:55

Release Date: July 28, 2011
Label: Metal on Metal Records

Bitter End - Have a Nice Death

Reviewer: Chris

November 3, 2011

Bitter End manages to take the early riffs music of Metallica’s Kill ‘em All and Dave Mustaine’s flat-sounding vocal and issue the originally shelved LP titled Have a Nice Death. I’ll spare the indignities of saying it should have been left there…well, I guess I won’t.

Let’s forget for a moment that these are some of the most incredibly sophomoric lyrics I’ve heard since Anthrax’s I’m the Man, but to be even more honest these individual lessons in the mundane make that track look like “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from Iron Maiden, but this little indiscretion can always be overlooked if the music herein is of high caliber and resounds far above and beyond the din of pedestrianism. This record clearly does not. To be even more brutally honest I hear music being played here, but I hear no emotion or honest feeling behind it, and if you think that is not easily discernible you’re mistaken. Anytime a fan can listen to a recording and be thoroughly bored and uninspired throughout its duration there’s a processing problem; the marks have been cast upon the foreheads and it is usually all downhill from there. By the time I’m meandering through “Right to Life” I’m casually attempting to force myself to remain interested. I usually can dissect an album, even a record I emphatically detest, and find something credible and resonating (if even for a song’s total length), but what I’m grasping at here is a reason to keep this on in the background.

The thrash metal provided here was originally recorded in 1991, well after bands like Exodus, Megadeth, Vio-Lence, Metallica and Testament made their respective strikes in the genre; the overwhelming difference is that those bands each produced a quality product and didn’t seem to be laboring through the processes of making an album. The bright exception here in the music in “Burning Bridges”, which castrates that annoying vocal and manages to afford us a quick peek inside to see that the band does have decent ideas when implemented with decisive care, but they ultimately get lost in translation. What manages to keep me even remotely interested in this record is the unabashed Megadeth worship in the riffs; once around this album and you’ll immediately get that feeling as well, I can guarantee it. That little saving grace aside, as I hear more of these lyrics I am really stifling giggling fits, and for a 39-year old guy to want to giggle during a thrash record it never really bodes well for the people involved.

What manages to incite even waning interest in this band is precisely what its undoing becomes; the aforementioned passionless construction of these tracks keeps me from enjoying it when it seems the band playing doesn’t enjoy much of it either. The only accurate description I can offer is that even at Dave Mustaine’s most chemically lethargic period of the late 80’s before Rust in Peace showed more life than the music here. Even the bass sounds like it’s in dire need of life support, and therein lays the unavoidable catharsis of where exactly to place this music in the overall line of grading. 

Now, to be fair, the demo for Meet Your Maker has infinitely more musical life than that initial album, even with those Mustaine-like vocals. The raw intensity of the title track alone makes the demos far more engaging than the album. Maybe it’s the lack of polish and counterproductive motions that really give this a kick, and to be honest I’m wishing they would have left the unreleased album in the vaults and reissued these demos as a 7” or MCD instead. At the very least, put the album as the bonus tracks, giving deserved spotlight to the true musical heroics here. The real collective treasure is found in these demos that, while still somewhat rudimentary, pack the biggest punch.

As for the two live tracks recorded in ’90 they show that Bitter End was definitely a much more viable live act than they were on record. The resilient and potent energy is certainly audible to me and I really wish I could grade the actual studio album higher, but the band gets points for the bonus material here. It would have been far more interesting to see these guys live back in the day; I’m thinking that when these four recorded the demos it was freefall going for it, throwing it all into the wind and having some fun with the material. Sadly, this didn’t resonate onto the album for me, making it appear quite haphazard and stoic in all the wrong areas. It could even be sufficed to say that the band seemed stiff and unsure in the Have a Nice Death sessions, and I may be wrong but as a fan it’s what I hear as a musician myself.

For what it’s worth, grab this for the demo material and cool live tracks, but simply considering the actual album as the bonus material might make it easier to swallow whole without water to wash it all down.

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