Randy Burns

Released through Caroline Records on June 20th, 1989, the record showed a band willing to stretch beyond straightforward crossover thrash.

Produced by Randy Burns, the album blended hardcore aggression with groove, unconventional rhythmic ideas and influences that reach beyond traditional thrash metal.

And that's important because Excel, they weren't simply just, you know, another band trying to play faster than everybody else.

They were experimenting with dynamics and riffs that could hit hard without necessarily moving at a breakneck speed.

We can challenge, you know, these narratives, these established narratives and disagree without pretending that every, you know, unanswered question has a definitive answer.

So what do you think? Did Metallica's Enter Sandman borrow too heavily from Excel's tapping into the emotional void? Or are we just simply hearing a musical resemblance that never proves deliberate copying and just really a basic coincidence that both songs were released within two years of each other? And if you've never listened to the jokes on you, I mean, it is time to give this overlooked crossover record and band a spin.

We even talked to producer Randy Burns on the Aftershocks a handful of years ago, and here's what he had to say.

Um, yeah, I, I don't know that that was a really tough one.

Go nuts.

And you know, everything you're doing so far..." And I remember on both records, the Individual Thought Patterns album and then the Symbolic album, there was only one beat that I had come up with where the producer, um, on Individual was Randy Burns, and then on Symbolic was, uh, Jim Morris.

There was only one beat out of the, you know, hundreds of beats that were on there that, where they were like, "That one's a little out of left field for me.

Can you kinda simplify that one a tick?" Yeah, sure.

So what was the experience, uh, of doing the second LP compared to the first one?

Well, we had more time in the studio and we had, you know, well, Randy Burns did our first album and he did our second album and he had done the first suicidal.

He did, I believe he did hell comes to your house, uh,

I think he did a, I think he did a peace cells from Megadeth too.