Thor’s latest album is Devastation of Musculation (Smog Veil, 2006), and insofar as it’s accurate to say that Thor is growing as a musician (within the confines of traditional metal, anyway), he is. His last album, 2005’s Thor Against The World, drew mainly on the glammy sounds of KISS, Alice Cooper and Sweet. It was a damn good album, but there were times when the metallic content dropped lower than might optimally have been desired. It seemed that, for all his talk of epic space-battles and Norse gods, Thor was going soft here and there.

Not so on Devastation of Musculation. The new album is harder, faster, and darker than its predecessor, and is evidence that, after decades of half-jokey and often-forgettable entertainment, Thor is figuring out how to do it right (albeit without sacrificing what makes Thor, Thor). The very first track, “Lords of Steel,” stomps along in a Black Sabbath mode and features some very nice extended guitar wailing the likes of which have rarely been sighted since acid-washed jeans went out of style. Maybe it’s not the greatest thing ever put on tape, but it’s a damned entertaining invitation to bang your head. The rest of the album continues in a similar British Heavy Metal vein, galloping along with an array of galloping Maiden/Priest grooves, while Thor grunts about the Devastation of Musculation, The Queen of The Damned, Odin’s Son, and Lies of Eternity in a voice that, for what it lacks in technical accomplishment, more than makes up for in personality and commitment to the moment.

After all, isn’t that what metal is about? If you strip the music away from, say, a Slayer album, you’re left with what amount to a bunch of supremely silly words. There’s nothing inherently scary about

Trapped in purgatory
A lifeless object, alive
Awaiting reprisal
Death will be their acquisition
The sky is turning red
Return to power draws near
Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears
Abolish the rules made of stone

I mean, come on! Every high school has some trenchcoated dork who writes doggerel like this in his notebook and thinks he’s being deep! And yet, throw in some manic drumming and heavily distorted guitars and the very same silliness that would get a dark and serious high-school poet laughed at, shunned, and these days examined by a team of psychologists, police investigators and anti-terror “experts,” somehow transmogrifies into a pounding, sinister all-time classic of thrash metal.

By the same token, lyrics like the following from Thor’s “Queen of the Damned”...

The deadliest of hungers
She feasts on human blood
The rapid sound of thunder
Bringing evil from above
The vampires all surround her
For the final feast
But she still holds the power
Until a new queen is released

... kind of suck out of context. But as hundreds of overly serious college theses and misguided poetry seminars have inadvertently proven, rock lyrics are not meant to exist apart from the music they are sung to. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? Write “Louie, Louie, hey, hey, wa ne ga go” on a page, and you’ve got nothing. But put it over that classic riff, and you’ve got magic, son. In the same way, once Thor puts his lyrics over thrashing guitars, a double-bass-drum attack, and presents them in his own powerful and guttural voice, those same stanzas become exactly what they should be: the audio equivalent of the best B-grade horror movie ever made (which, by the way, is Evil Dead II. No debate allowed.)

Oh, in case you’re wondering, the phrase “Devastation of Musculation” refers to two things: the poorly defined retribution that awaits the foes of THOR as he rides the universe on his steed; and a story that Thor heard about a guy who pumped up his biceps so far with steroids, oil in injections, and heavy reps that his arm actually exploded. According to Thor himself,

“Everyone is under pressure to achieve the impossible every day. People risk their lives to be more beautiful, more handsome, more skinny, more muscular and faster, stronger, richer, and deadlier. Trying to make sense out of these desperate measures is what this new album is about. It is easily the darkest and most powerful album I’ve ever written.”

Coming from a guy who used to pose in poodle hair and tiger-stripe bikini briefs, this kind of statement might be easily dismissed. But, even considering that metal at its finest needs to stay stupid in order to stay metal, there’s something to this. Thor seemed to wear a smirk through half the songs on Thor Against The World. On Devastation, there’s not much smirking. There’s more skulls, smoking corpses, demons, and smoky battlefields. And if the music doesn’t necessarily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Number of the Beast, Reign In Blood, or British Steel, it’s still the best B-Movie Metal you’re gonna find.

If you’re looking for subtlety, I suggest you pick up Tool’s excellent latest album. But if you’re looking for well-done classic metal sung by a former bodybuilder who had the sense to stay out of politics, you’re in good shape with Devastation of Musculation. Somehow, now, in his third decade of recording stone-obvious muscle rock for a parade of indie labels, Thor seems to be figuring out how to balance camp and carnage. By any standard, Devastation of Musculation ain’t half bad, and as long as you take it for what it is - the aural equivalent of movies like Escape from New York and, yes, the animated classic Heavy Metal, you can do much worse than to heed the mighty word of THOR.

[Crossposted at blogcritics.org]