I’ve been reading Metal Mark’s countdown of the best metal albums of 1986 lately and it has me thinking about crossover. During the mid 80s, speed metal was the result of hardcore’s influence on a group of young metal bands looking for something new on one side and young hardcore bands looking to tighten up their sound on the other. Bands like Metallica and Slayer and Anthrax had more in common with hardcore than they did with more traditional metal just like Agnostic Front or DRI had more in common with metal than with the Pistols or the Clash. So it was an interesting time as 7 Seconds pleaded with us to “Walk Together, Rock Together,” it was already happening.
But there’s another crossover that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle a bit. Other punk bands started incorporating more metal influences, albeit not in the play-as-fast-as-we-can meeting of the minds that occured with speed metal and hardcore. A lot of this other crossover centered in the SST Records catalog with a few related bands thrown in. Black Flag had slowed their pace down and turned up the riffage as early as My War, but by Loose Nut, the 70s hard rock/heavy metal influence was abundantly clear. The Circle Jerks followed suit with a pair of metalic offerings in Wonderful and VI. These were still punk records in both spirit and execution, but influence of metal is clearer as they slowed things down. There were also a slew of lesser bands dabbling in this slower, looser metal crossover. DC3, Overkill (not to be confused with the better-known speed metal band), SWA and others all exhibited similar influences and put out records that shouldn’t have been forgotten as they were.