VEXED, Italian Aggressive Attack (2002, demo)

The skull:
There’s not much to say about this almost incomprehensibly ugly cover, once said ugliness is duly noted, but I will say that after discovering this skull, I spent entirely too long in a fruitless search on the internet for information about the band Jexed. And no, having to weed through the four consecutive prepositional phrases ending that sentence does not even begin to simulate the frustration I felt in my quest. Although made-up, “jexed” is a word with some currency on the intertubes, but I guess that should come as no surprise. You might think that “Italian Aggressive Attack” is sufficiently unique to turn up some results, but no, that will only get you articles about soccer, or “football” as it is known to most of the shittiest thrash bands in the world. But Jexed, I mean Vexed, are nothing if not true to their vision, because their logo remains unchanged to this day, and at least half of their albums feature some manner of Big Dumb Skull. They clearly just don’t give a shit.

The music:
If Vexed played Maiden-style true metal, and if they hailed from Japan instead of Italy, they’d be Metalucifer. Which is to say that Vexed are shoddy musicians peddling insultingly derivative songs and singing with a hilarious accent in the service of a musical project that is maybe almost bad enough to be funny, except it’s probably not supposed to be a joke, so it’s just sad and stupid. At least, that’s the case on this early two-song effort from the band. This is more than ten years old, so maybe they’ve gotten a lot better in the past decade, but based on this couple of early Kreator knockoffs, I wouldn’t bank on it.
— Friar Johnsen