THE REICH TIME
“It was fuckin’ magical,” says Phil Rind, Sacred Reich’s singer and bassist. He is describing the experience of putting together the band’s first album in 23 years – the monster Awakening. “We’d just pinch ourselves and look at each other and say, ‘This is so killer.’ We want the record to do good and we believe people will like it. But even if no one does, we know what we did. That is reward in itself.”
Phil and guitarist Jason Rainey formed Sacred Reich in Phoenix, Arizona, back in 1985. The following year, when thrash metal broke through after Metallica’s epoch-defining Master Of Puppets, they released a demo tape, Draining You Of Life. With its sparky blend of ratcheting brutality and precocious songcraft, it quickly became the thrash scene’s hottest, most in-demand demo, drawing the attention of Metal Blade with help from local buddy Jason Newsted and his band, Flotsam And Jetsam.
On their debut LP,, the young band incorporated a political and social conscience – addressing problems such as pollution, world hunger, American warmongering and indoctrination in schools – that came to distinguish their approach. But they were never dry, worthy or preachy with it, as they proved with 1988’s uproarious followup, .
