About fucking time!! Testament is finally back with a new album. It has been nine excruciating years, before this worthy follow-up to their 1999 album The Gathering. A lot has happened since then, while Chuck Billy was struggling with cancer, the rest of the band saw their record deal change to the worst. Spitfire Records really didn’t care about them anymore and Testament didn’t feel like giving them new material. This resulted in First Strike Still Deadly, a great album with fresh new recordings of old tunes. Followed by a few useless compilation albums and a great live recording called Live in London. After that, Testament finally got rid of Spitfire. Their new record deal with Nuclear Blast paved the way for this release, The Formation of Damnation.

 

The record marks the return of original members Alex Skolnick on guitar and Greg Christian on bass. The album starts off with an instrumental song and kicks in with ‘More Than Meets The Eye’ and it is like the last nine years never happened. Throughout the years Skolnick was heavily involved in the jazz fusion scene. The return of this lost son to Testament has not affected the style of the solos and the songs. They simply took the next logical musical step after The Gathering.

 

It isn’t like a calculated action or anything; they’re just deeply appreciative of the continued support during those difficult years. And they are fully aware that the path they took after Low is the right one to follow. They still perform with the same focus, intensity, as they always have. Ferocious thrash metal, flavoured with death metal ingredients as Testament thunders through the 10 new tracks relentlessly. They haven’t got soft on the lyric side either, as ‘The Evil Has Landed’ deals about the September 11^th terrorist attacks and ‘The Persecuted Won’t Forget’ is about the last thoughts of a man hanging at the gallows pole.  

 

Welcome back guys!!