Some debut albums feel like annunciations. A band comes out of nowhere and causes an unsuspecting world to stand at attention. Others feel more like victory laps — culminations of years of visible, tireless work. Manifest Decimation, Power Trip’s scorching first LP, felt like a little bit of both. By the summer of 2013, the Dallas crossover wreckers had already been ripping up the metal and hardcore circuits for half a decade. They had a stack of tapes and 7-inches to their name, not to mention a couple of hot-shit anthems and future live staples in “Divine Apprehension” and “Suffer No Fool.” At the same time, they hadn’t quite broken out beyond the hardcore record collectors, message-board nerds, and Texas scene denizens who formed their core fan base. Manifest Decimation changed that. Power Trip went from an underground concern to a band held up as the future of heavy metal seemingly overnight. Dropping the needle on Manifest Decimation a decade later confirms that all that hype was completely deserved.
Here’s the part where I reveal that I moved to New York City in the summer of 2013. Being young and broke and bug-eyed over the seemingly infinite possibilities of your new life has a way of imbuing albums with talismanic powers, and Manifest Decimation definitely felt magical to me at the time. I listened to it on the subway, in the park, on my office speakers, on the incredibly shitty turntable in the studio apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend, now-wife in Jamaica, Queens. I was in New York and Power Trip were down in Texas, but being in the city and processing that music through my experiences made me feel like I was bearing personal witness to their rise. I saw Power Trip for the first time a few months after arriving in New York, at Greenpoint’s hallowed Saint Vitus Bar. (I felt like I was witnessing its rise, too; Vitus had just opened in 2011, but it already felt like CBGB to me.) I’ve been to at least a hundred Vitus shows since that Power Trip gig, and I can still remember the precise energy and configuration of the room when they played. I remember seeing my friend Chris Hansell from the great hardcore band Warthog posted up behind the band’s amps during their set. Me, I was more or less pinned in place in the front row — dodging spin-kicks, catching stage-divers, and shouting every line back at Riley Gale. It was an experience that bordered on the ecstatic.
Power Trip’s insane live show had plenty to do with their ascent, but without Manifest Decimation, that climb never would have happened. As great as a lot of those pre-LP tunes were, they came out on releases that were limited in nature, in short bursts that could only hint at the band’s obviously huge potential. At 34 minutes, Manifest Decimation was a grand artistic statement from a band who, to that point, hadn’t wanted to make one. For the album’s first 40 seconds, there’s just a few robotic synth bloops and a steadily intensifying haze of guitar feedback. It’s a calm before the storm, a little time to gather yourself before the band kicks things off in earnest. When Chris Ulsh’s pounding, reverb-soaked drums come in and “Manifest Decimation” starts to pop off, all that awesome potential is realized in an instant. The first riff explodes out of the speakers like “Battery” after the acoustic part, or “Black Sabbath” after the rain-soaked intro. The band doesn’t let their foot off the gas for the rest of the album.
It’s hard to pick one standout element of Manifest Decimation, but that crazy drum sound is up there. Ulsh sounds like he’s playing in a bomb shelter, with each snare hit and bass kick designed to test the integrity of the walls. Gale’s jagged howl of a voice is bathed in the same blown-out reverb, and every syllable he sings is chased by a booming echo of itself. His lyrics, in the age-old thrash tradition, are frequently disturbing and despondent but delivered with such vigor that they become oddly life-affirming. The album’s first line is “Under the boot of great oppression, we slither and crawl.” I’ve watched a couple hundred kids scream that line in unison like supplicants crying out for salvation. Gale had that kind of presence, even if he likely saw himself more as one of the kids shouting at the stage than as the hero receiving their adulation.
As brilliant as Ulsh and Gale both are on Manifest Decimation, it’s probably still best understood as a guitar record. In 34 minutes, Nick Stewart and Blake Ibanez etched their names in thrash history next to duos like Hetfield/Hammett and King/Hanneman. First and most importantly, the riffs on Manifest Decimation just go irresponsibly fucking hard. All of them. Stewart and Ibanez were at least as inspired by the metallic NYHC of Cro-Mags and Leeway as they were the technical mastery of the Bay Area thrash bands, and the combination of precision and ass-beating they found on the album felt damn near revolutionary. Their solos were just as brilliant; like Slayer and Cannibal Corpse before them, they found a way to make chromatic, divebombing chaos catchy. You can hum every lead on the album, and that’s by design. Even in the album’s rare quieter moments, the guitars steal the show. “Hammer Of Doubt” – the best song Power Trip ever wrote, for my money – starts with an extended sample of M. Emmet Walsh’s monologue from Blood Simple, the one that ends with “What I know about is Texas, and down here, you’re on your own.” Stewart and Ibanez accompany it with a hypnotic, Seasons In The Abyss-style riff, letting the feedback ring out. It makes Walsh sound like the toughest motherfucker who ever lived.
I could go on and on about specific riffs: the spine-breaking bridge from “Heretic’s Fork,” the punishing verse riff on “Murderer’s Row,” the mosh part at the tail end of “Crossbreaker.” All those riffs sound incredible on record, but they all sounded even better onstage. Within a few short years, Power Trip went from being a Saint Vitus band to a multiple-nights-at-Elsewhere band. Their show never wavered in intensity, and they never seemed to lose any cranky old fans, the way most underground-bred bands do when they get big. They just kept welcoming more people into the tent. I saw one of those Elsewhere gigs in 2019, and it remains the only time I’ve had my glasses knocked off my face and destroyed in a mosh pit. I watched the rest of that show with a bloody forehead and blurry vision, and it was one of the best nights of my life. It was also the last time I saw Power Trip. In August 2020, in the hellish depths of that first pandemic summer, Riley Gale died. The world still feels empty without him. His death snuffed the flame of maybe the most universally beloved metal band of the 2010s, a band who was still on the rise at the time of the pandemic shutdown. Power Trip should be headlining arenas right now. Instead, they’re indefinitely on hold. It sucks.
Gale’s surviving bandmates haven’t officially closed the book on Power Trip, but even if they do return in some form, it’s hard to imagine things feeling the same. Gale was a giant. I can’t count the number of metal and hardcore bands I’ve seen shout him out from the stage over the past couple of years. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone in Power Trip doing whatever they need to do to move forward. Ibanez currently plays alongside members of Skourge, Impalers, and Creeping Death in the killer (and distinctly Power Trip-like) Texas supergroup Fugitive, and Ulsh keeps busy with a half-dozen projects at any given time. But there was only one Power Trip, and if you were there, you know how precious the gift they shared with the world was. On Manifest Decimation, you can still hear that gift, in all its blazing splendor.
