Those were dark days - tumultuous teenage years - since my mom, as matriarch of our conservative Christian household, decided to wage holy war on my heavy metal cassette tape collection.  Halloween night of 1988 was D-Day, the culmination of all my mom's satanic paranoia.  While I was out with a friend, my mom gestapo-raided my bedroom, pilfering my tape stash.  After her looting spree, she marched to her room and waited for me to arrive.  On returning home I was instantly ushured into her lair where she lectured me on the evil of my ways and then burned my tapes before my eyes!  That was the day, the hour and the minute that I knew it was imperative to take some sort of action.  I pondered running away, but I squelched that idea quickly.  Then I thought to myself that I could do the media scapegoat thing and kill my mom (and my dad for his complacency) before offing myself (with Ozzy on the turntable, no less), but I liked myself too much for that sort of thing.  Or, I figured, I could go underground, so to speak.  Rebuild from the bottom up beneath the panoptic gaze of my mom.  I chose the latter.  From that moment on, metal became contraband (and I do not mean the lackluster Michael Schenker-Shari Peterson - of Vixen, for god's sake - one-semihit wonder collaboration).   

Fast-forward to the aforementioned summer afternoon in mountainous Colorado Springs.  After successfully ditching my parents, I made a b-line straight to Camelot Records with one purpose - to purchase the focus of this review.  My destiny became clear after my first viewing of "Hello from the Gutter" that I sneakpeeked one late night on "The Headbanger's Ball" (R. I. P.).  There was speed, aggression, banging heads and - Jesus Christ! - a winged, horned skull that flew around the city, rounding up people for the Overkill gig.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

With the psychological catharsis now out of my system, what better time to segue into a discussion of the album than now.  Let me start by saying that Overkill has constantly evolved, albeit an evolution that has not ostracized their fans.  With Under the Influence the band tightened its delivery, which owes much to the Eddie Van Halen of Shred, Bobby Gustafson.  Yet what grabs me at the throat about this album is its immediacy.  In many ways it is as if they locked the band into a 3' X 5' cell and punched play on a tape recorder.  As a result, the musical delivery is raw and aggressive, as opposed to the more polished aggressiveness that is evidenced on the post- The Years of Decay albums.  Simply put, this album contains no filler - pure, unadulturated mayhem.  "Shred," the album's opener, just begs for the listener to rip shit up, while numbers such as "Drunken Wisdom," "Overkill III (Under the Influence)" and the serene interlude interwoven within "End of the Line" - reflective of a Metallica "Master of Puppets" (the song) influence - slow down to a chugging crawl without sacrificing any of the album's intensity.

This is, quite simply, still my favorite Overkill album.  No metalhead's collection should be without it.