Before going full-on hillbilly-folk, however, Mustaine brings it back to a haunting, militaristic arrangement punctuated with staccato riffs. “The Blackest Crow” opens with a banjo sequence the surprises continue with the addition of violins. “Dance In The Rain” – featuring a guest appearance from Disturbed’s David Draiman – and “Beginning Of Sorrow” both offer a change of pace akin to Megadeth’s classic “In My Darkest Hour,” before things take a turn for the unexpected. Meanwhile, “Burn!” and “Off The Edge” are midtempo tracks reminiscent of Megadeth’s NWOBHM roots, while the likes of “Built For War” is a groove-metal track on which the band get creative with off-kilter time signatures. True to his word, Mustaine took the opportunity to write a heavy song with a more archetypal structure, rather than blasting listeners with breakneck riffs. “Super Collider,” however, offers an immediate change of pace. Anyone expecting Mustaine to follow the made-for-radio of those bands, however, would have been surprised by the galloping thrash attack of the album’s opening track, “Kingmaker.” The song was the first to feature a writing credit from bassist David Ellefson after his return to the band (he had departed following 2001’s The World Needs A Hero), so it’s perhaps fitting that its febrile pace harkens back to Megadeth’s earlier sound. Like Th1rt3en before it, Super Collider was produced by Johnny K, a man who knows a thing or two about commercial metal, with albums by the likes of Disturbed, Sevendust, and Staind to his credit. But then a polished sheen didn’t do any harm to Countdown To Extinction, which remains Megadeth’s most commercially successful album. The risk, then, was in potentially alienating purist fans. “They are going to listen to that and think, I like that one song, and they are going to get the record and listen to the rest of the album and go, ‘Man, I love this style of music. “I think it also opens up a door,” he said. The concluding "Primary" may well be the most conventional of all the songs in ways - a line of descent from Joy Division via a hint of early U2 is clear - but as before it's the careful, calm arrangement that shows this is Supercollider's song, a lovely fragility.In fact, Mustaine saw his band as capable of drawing in fans who didn’t necessarily like metal, but would want to explore it on the strength of the songs he crafted for Super Collider. Horton's obsessive repeating of the final syllable of the song title in "Aluminum," whether chopped up and looped or spoken, becomes an eerily beautiful mantra, while the piano of "Pedestrian" adds a sweet, strange beauty reminiscent of Colin Newman's early-'80s work. Slower songs gave both players a chance to show even more ability and variety, finding a hard-to-describe balance between tension and a strange calm. Horton's guitar overdubs on "Supercollider" itself, the album's sole instrumental, are masterpieces of atmosphere as obsessive speed - Haut doesn't even drum on it - while the jauntiness/reflectiveness juxtaposition of "Sooner" makes it a standout. The sampler the duo used - which rather than filling out the mix was used to create the core notes and patterns Horton and Haut played around and with - is the secret weapon, used beautifully. Vague parallels could be suggested with the similar maximum/minimum approach of Krautrock bands like Can or Neu!, but there isn't any connection in terms of the sound. But instead of reflective dreaminess, there was power without explosion here - guitars were played as punchy pulse-making instruments, setting rhythms and shifting moods rather than playing conventional melodies. Michael Horton's higher-pitched speak-singing voice and less-is-more guitar playing suggested a more wired-up version of Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column, a comparison slightly heightened by the drums of Phillip Haut here and there. From its minimal start, Supercollider's debut showcases a band that was happily and completely out of sync with almost everything around it - nothing in American pop and rock music of 1991 sounded anything like it, much less the indie music scene it was part of by default.
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