Christ, this is a big ol’ beast of an album – fucking thing makes me want to stamp on another man’s hip. First-album Cro-Mags covering choice ‘Ride The Lightning’ numbers just about sums it up better than any thousand-word discourse on tone, texture and dynamic ever could, and while some of the riffs might appear to have been lifted wholesale from the Hetfield songbook the big boast is met resoundingly enough to make any cries of plagiarism seem like small beer. Brutal, thundersome and meatily satisfying in the same way as cleaving in half the skulls of thine enemies, ‘The Sleeping Eye’ is a work of cloven-hoofed mastery that could well make these guys a High On Fire for the punker set.
