Album Reviews
Movie Reviews
Concert Reviews

Top 10
Resources
Time Wasters
Contact Us

The Lead digitally re-mastered? I guess it had to happen. This band's radical, God core, punk music fueled by Nina Llopis' mono-scream vocals and Julio Rey's breakneck guitar is long remembered for its speed, cutting, literate lyrics and raw power. Finally available is The Lead's first EP. _Return Fire_'s 19 live songs, all here. So is _Automoloch_ and _Burn This Record._ Sadly, there are no bonus tracks.

Think D.R.I., The Crucified, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag and Slayer in sound. Christian hall of fame journalist Brian Quincy Newcomb tagged the band with the term the "God Pistols!"

There has never been a band like The Lead--not ever. Not for me. They were always about spirit, raw energy and going-for-it! Though there were mistakes, their records were perfect. The Lead packed more into a two-minute song than anyone I've ever heard. The minute "Question the Authority" on their  7-inch back in the mid-80s came busting thru the speakers, it was all over. We must have started our radio show with this song for weeks. So glad to see it available again.

Warning: If you consume to this two-CD set at one sitting, you may need oxygen.

Bob Felberg  December 18, 2006

Punk rock wasn't always the domain of photogenic young things given to emotionalism and the leap from MySpace to the hope for a platinum album. When "hardcore" was the adjective commonly used to modify "punk" in the 1980s, primal musical aggression and tempos verering toward the supersonic demanded equally forceful lyrical content delivered with commensurate conviction. 

Entering the hardcore fray in mid-decade were The Lead. Nearly all of the co-ed Florida trio's studio output is now collected in Hardcore For Jesus. The four years of artistic evoltion it evidences is as revelatory as its evangelistic/testimonial fervor. 

From their debut four-song 7-inch EP  in '85, The Lead distinguished itself , but not only by their Christianity. Having dual lead vocalist-songwriters in guitarist Julio Rey and bassist Nina Llopis set them apart, as did a vanguely English attack on  such numbers as "It's Thru You" and anti-abortion "Better Off." 

Drummer Robbie Christie began contributing verses and vocals with the act's longest release, '86's cassette-only Return Fire.  A virtuosic tightness began to develop amid the lo-fi cacaphony. "Lead Us To Salvation" evinced a power-boogie spawl, "Emergency" and "The Law Of Love" messed with club beats before the latter skidded into a hyper-frenzied 180 with "Throwaway." Llopis begins to sound all the more feminine on numbers such as "Take Him Home," and Rey maims  blues influence on "No Religion." 

A pair of 12-inch EPs followed, and with them, slightly cleaner production values. Automolech delved into drum effects perhaps not replicable in a concert setting, an epic song length or two, and a Resurrection Band remake ("Alienated"). And Llopis speaks directly as ever to non-believers on "No One's An Atheist" and "You Don't Need Him." The passion she conjures result in arguably her most powerful vocal perforances as well. Such spiritual bravado didn't win the band any fans among writers for such doctrinairely secular punk 'zines as   Maximumrocknroll, but general market hardcore bands still called on them as an openning act when touring the country's southermost peninsula . 

The Past Behind, included here in its original indie incarnation before being remade for R.E.X. Records, signaled the final intermediary step between The Lead's punk roots and culmination as an extreme metal unit. To that effect, "Puritan" blurs by in nearly abstract noisiness as a re-recording of 'No Religion" and "Jesus Became Sin" are clarion declarations. 

Second guitarist Andy Coyle joined for The Lead's finale, Burn This Record. Perhaps proving that at least some of the chasm between punk and metal was in how the guitar feedback gets processed, this is the group's sonically darkest record, owing aesthetic debt to their home state's then-burgeoning death metal and contemporaneous Northern California thrash. As they had on previous outings, they recycled their own past. "Kill Satan Mosh" reprises the apparently less pummelling "Kill Satan" on Return Fire. Gallows humor creeps into "Hope You Stay Alive" and "Oh No, Not Again." Llopis adds both gravitas about abortion on "Who's The Victim" and skirts the edge of silliness with "Skate Or Die" (prehaps sillier for those of us who can't balance wih wheels on our feet to save our neck). 

What makes Hardcore a nearly complete compilation, and not the whole enchilada, is the accidental exclusion of  Burn's concluding track, "Wink Of An Eye." You, however, can find it as a free download on-ironically enough?- www.MySpace.com/TheLead. 

As a nostalgia trip for those who lived it and the Living Word wed to aural adrenaline that has maintained its urgent, plainspoken power, this is  Hardcore indeed.
 
Jamie Lee Rake