Dan Lilker is underground metal’s Forrest Gump — he turns up everywhere. He was present at the beginning of thrash, playing bass on Anthrax’s 1984 debut, A Fistful of Metal (Megaforce), before deciding they were a bunch of pansies and setting out to do something heavier. He was there for the infamous Stormtroopers of Death album Speak English or Die in 1985. He kick-started the modern-day extreme-metal craze by forming the trailblazing Brutal Truth in 1990. But we’ll always remember him most fondly for Nuclear Assault, the complex and forboding thrash band he formed directly after leaving Anthrax.

In the Reagan/Bush ’80s, as the Cold War heated up one last time before thawing out for good, the threat of impending nuclear holocaust was an easy target for metal. But no one pursued that theme with more single-mindedness than Nuclear Assault, who preached visions of catastrophe like a Pentecostalist talking up the Rapture and fronting an outfit whose sound lived up to the devastation its name implied. A decade before, the Sex Pistols had proclaimed that there was "no future," but Nuclear Assault’s declaration of "no future" was a little more literal-minded. They indulged a morbid fixation with mushroom clouds, but they also diffused it with humor: on their debut, Game Over (Combat), the instrumental title track brought the world to an end not with a bang but with the sound of Pac Man being gobbled by ghosts. By 1990, Nuclear Assault had begun to branch out into other topics, though the album they released that year was called Handle with Care (Combat), and its cover showed the title stamped on a picture of the earth. The threat of all-out annihilation had waned, and though the band stuck around for another few years, they never again made a good record.

You don’t have to look much farther than the front page of the newspaper these days to figure out that nuclear fright is back, and that’s as good a reason as any for the recent Nuclear Assault reunion, which will bring singer John Connelly’s preternaturally odd voice — somewhere between the penetrating whine of an emergency-broadcast siren and a radiation-sickness patient in mid vomit — to a new generation of A-bomb-fearing young men. The group are kicking off their comeback with a live album, Alive Again, on New Hampshire’s Screaming Ferret Wreckords — it proves, if nothing else, that they’ve still got the old fire — and they’ll begin a tour with a gig at Club 125 (978-521-0099) in Bradford on Friday. The following Friday, January 17, they’ll be at the El-N-Gee (860-437-3800) in New London.

In the event of a nuclear war, there would be, of course, a few survivors, and we suspect that the cockroaches of the world would end up plunking down plenty of hard-earned bread crumbs to see the Rolling Stones, who’ve survived worse already. For what amounts to their fourth gig in the area in the last 12 months, the Stones are at the FleetCenter (617-931-2000) on Sunday, and tickets — topping out at $350 — are still available.

Issue Date: January 9 - 16, 2003
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