RELICS FROM THE CRYPT, the sub-label of DYING VICTIMS PRODUCTIONS dedicated to keeping the past alive, is proud to present a reissue of the cult third album of Japan’s SACRIFICE, Tears, on CD and vinyl LP formats.
Arguably, they’d perfect that signature style with 1990’s Total Steel, which RELICS FROM THE CRYPT would reissue on vinyl in 2021, but there’s something uniquely powerful about its follow-up, Tears.
Released in 1992 and again featuring the band’s signature steel-encased demon mascot, SACRIFICE’s Tears was even more of anomaly than its not-inconsiderable predecessor. Compared to 1990, in 1992 was crossover largely dead on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, SACRIFICE continued to fight the good fight and formed & finessed the idiom to their own idiosyncratic design. Such is intrinsic to their native musical culture, much in the way that Japanese punk takes bog-standard tropes and upends them in unique ways. So, while Total Steel took then-contemporaneous Cro-Mags, Venom, Razor, Carnivore, the UK’s Sacrilege, Nasty Savage, The Exploited, and even early Celtic Frost and spat it out as something that sounded like all those simultaneously and nothing like ‘em at all, Tears, by comparison, more often slowed down the still-hammering pulse and added a bit more space and daresay emotion – not for nothing is the album titled Tears, right? – and returned with something even more varied, more dynamic, and especially more world-eating. One need only peruse the album’s titles – “Hardest Life,” “Time Slips Through In Front of Your Eyes,” “Broken Heroes,” and the utterly classic opener “Never Land Never Again” among them – as well as the lyric sheet to find support for that “emotional” statement.
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