It’s not a rare phenomenon for established bands to pay tribute to their main influences that in one way or another helped them form their sound and why not their overall presence in the music business. The thing that’s somehow special is when we see bands from a specific genre doing cover songs of outfits that don’t even remotely belong to their musical style. Anthrax’ case is well documented and characteristic. A N.Y. based thrash band –with an obvious tendency towards the crossover sound all these years- and with influences that normally should have been traced back to the early East Coast hardcore/punk soud or/and the emblematic for the thrash movement N.W.O.B.H.M. Nevertheless, “Anthems” include 6 renditions of famous 70s groups that according to Mr. Benante and Ian defined Anthrax style.

So, what we get here are more or less faithful renditions of “TNT” (AC/DC), “Anthem” (Rush), “Smokin’” (Boston), “Keep on Running” (Journey), “Big Eyes” (Cheap Trick) and “Jailbreak” (Thin Lizzy) plus a remix of one of Athrax tunes called “Crawl”. The fact that the New Yorkers didn’t deviate far from the original version should be positively evaluated…after all, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do a respectable version of a Journey tune (Steve Perry era, that is…). Having said that, this is an EP forwarded exclusively toa ll the perfectionists out there who want to have everything by Anthrax or by one of the aforementioned bands.
 
Highlight: In the past Anthrax had paid tribute to other 70s artists like KISS and Alice Cooper (although, technically, Alice is a 60s artist!).

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Anthrax