Relics From the Crypt – the sub-label of Dying Victims Productions dedicated to keeping the past alive – announces December 19th as the international release date for a reissue of the cult third album of Japan’s Sacrifice, Tears, on CD and vinyl LP formats: Videopremiere: SACRIFICE (JPN) | DEAF FOREVER
From their humble beginnings in 1985 on to their super-cult debut album, 1987’s Crest of Black, Japan’s Sacrifice have stood for uncompromising, world-eating, thrashy METAL. Let’s reiterate: thrashy heavy metal rather than pure thrash metal. Thick and viscous is their thrust, with straightforward songwriting and exceptionally mean delivery. 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. As such, Tears could quite possibly eclipse Total Steel as Sacrifice’s ultimate statement…but cruelly enough, the album currently stands as their recorded epitaph, for they broke up after its release and have yet to release anything following their 2020 reunion.
Even after all these years, Tears stands as a massive achievement during a strange era for metal, and possibly sounds even more refreshing today. Metalheads, punks, and metalpunks are hereby commanded to bow down again before Sacrifice!
