Annihilator - Bag of Tricks (1994)

The cover artwork for Bag of Tricks might actually be a little cooler than the two full-length albums before it, but that's nothing to get excited about, as this is merely an early fan-package probably released to fill out some contractual agreement with Roadrunner. I believe Annihilator had at this point moved over to Music for Nations for new studio material, so this feels like a loose collection of odds and ends that suffers a bit from the inconsistency of its contents. At the very least, though, we would assume we could be spared from the lamentable direction the band proper had taken through its mid-90s material, and Bag of Tricks was sticking to the band's demos and debut album and little else. To that end, this was probably worth tracking down if only for the diehards.

By far the best content here are the unreleased tracks "Back to the Crypt" and "Gallery" which had Randy Rampage on vocals and were recorded as demos for Never, Neverland while he was still in the lineup, but for whatever dumb reason never manifest on the actual album. These aren't the catchiest songs the group had written, but they definitely remind me of tunes like "Wicked Mystic" or "Burns Like a Buzzsaw Blade" and have some of that early nastiness present. Riff-wise, they aren't super memorable, but the leads are good and the energy is fiendish and vibrant as the band was when they hit the studio for the debut, and in fact these tunes belong more with that than the sophomore. The "Alison Hell" remastered track is worthless to me, why bother messing with something that was already excellent, and it doesn't offer enough of a notable difference for me to care. The demo cuts for Set the World on Fire are also quite uninteresting, and the new track from that era, "Fantastic Things", feels like an acoustic AOR track that would have only brought that album down even more, though it of itself isn't entirely terrible.

The old demo at the end of the compilation is pretty neat because you're hearing tunes like "Alison Hell" and "Phantasmagoria" with even more savage, extreme vocals from Jeff Waters which were quite hilarious but also kind of awesome at the same time. And the EP's worth of live tracks are actually recorded decently enough for the 80s or early 90s and make "Human Insecticide" and "W.T.Y.D." shien in the live setting. So ultimately, this could better be titled Mixed Bag of Tricks, but at least half of the content shouldn't have been tossed into the bin, and as a fan of those first two albums I thought it was neat to hear those unreleased tracks and confirmation of the band's skill in the live setting. At the same time, a little bit of a painful reminder of the band's then-present decline in quality.

Verdict: Indifference [5.25/10]

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