OUTRAGE

OUTRAGE
Biography

Outrage are a thrash metal band formed in Nagoya, Japan, in 1982. They made their debut with a self-released EP in 1987 and have gone on making records ever since without once breaking up or standing down. The line-up of Naoki Hashimoto on vocals, Yosuke Abe on guitar, Yoshihiro Yasui on bass and Shinya Tange on drums settled in 1986, and apart from one stretch between 1999 and 2007 the same four men have carried the band to this day.

Formation and the self-released EP, 1982 to 1987

The band came together in Nagoya in 1982. The original four were Yosuke Abe on guitar, Yoshihiro Yasui on bass, Shinya Tange on drums and Senpo Ito singing, and their set was built mainly on covers of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, played in local venues.

Ito left in 1986 and Naoki Hashimoto, who had been in another band, took his place, completing the line-up that has lasted since. The following year their own label, Pile Driver Records, issued the debut EP, Outrage. The design of its sleeve later earned the record its nickname, Peke Rage.

Thrash metal was gathering force in Japan at the time and a number of fine bands were competing. The stone this EP threw into that water is remembered as an answer sent from Nagoya to Metallica - though not an imitation of one. The band had their roots in the NWOBHM, in the hard rock and heavy metal of the seventies and early eighties, and in punk and hardcore, and the record is what came of that. The guitar solo in Step On It is built with a maturity hard to credit to a teenager, and at a time when shouting was taken for granted in thrash, Hashimoto's voice - rough but carrying a melody squarely - caught the ear.

The EP sold out quickly and stayed hard to obtain for some while. Two of its songs, Under Control Of Law and Edge Of Death, were re-recorded for the first full-length album, and the four original recordings were finally put on CD in 1997 as the second disc of It's Packed!! - 10th Anniversary Live & Rare Edition.

A major label and the first three albums, 1988 to 1990

Black Clouds took the band to a major label in 1988. It widens out what the EP had shown, and yet in the space of about a year they had moved a long way: set beside the European and American thrash metal records well known in Japan, there was nothing about it that fell short. A reading of Flower Travellin' Band's Slowly But Surely is one of its marks.

The second album, Blind to Reality (1989), grew fiercer still through writing that piles one riff onto the next. The third, The Great Blue (1990), continues from it while letting a little space into the arrangements to bring the singing forward.

The Final Day and the German sessions, 1991

The fourth album, The Final Day, released in 1991, is the first the band recorded outside Japan. It was made in Germany with Stefan Kaufmann producing, then known as the former drummer of Accept.

Until that point the band had struggled to reach the sound they wanted; here, they have said, it arrived at the first test recording. What followed is a record whose writing, playing and production all stand above anything they had made before. The speed and aggression of thrash metal remain, but the arrangements open out further than on The Great Blue, rebuilt around the voice so that every instrument has room.

Hashimoto's range as a singer widens considerably here, and at moments he phrases in a way that recalls Billy Idol. River, included on the album, is the band's first outright ballad, and he is said to have refused at first to record it.

Changes through the nineties, 1993 to 1997

Across the fifth, sixth and seventh albums - Spit (1993), Life Until Deaf (1995) and Who We Are (1997) - the band took in a widening range of material rather than staying inside thrash metal. At the same time they read the movement of the period from metal towards grunge and alternative rock, and the sound was brought up to date with each record.

A two-disc tenth-anniversary release, It's Packed!! - 10th Anniversary Live & Rare Edition, appeared in 1997, its second disc carrying the four songs of the long-unobtainable debut EP.

The trio years, 1999 to 2004

Hashimoto left in 1999. The three who remained decided to carry on without replacing him, with Yasui taking the vocals. The records of this period - the EPs Volume One (2001) and Play Loud EP (2002), the eighth album 24-7 (2002) and the ninth, Cause For Pause (2004) - are plainer in construction than those made with Hashimoto, and sit closer to heavy rock, or to rock and roll, than to metal.

As the band themselves have acknowledged, looking back the change was one they needed; had the four of them carried on unchanged they might have broken up instead. Deadbeat, from the ninth album and also issued as a single, has gone on being sung since Hashimoto returned: written by three men and played by four, it still comes out sounding unmistakably like this band.

The return, and the present, from 2007

On 2 September 2007, at a show marking twenty years since their debut, held at Club Citta' in Kawasaki, Hashimoto returned. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, but the response was such that his permanent return was announced on the band's website on 8 February 2008.

In 2009 the band went to Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, Sweden, where the studio's owner Fredrik Nordstrom produced their tenth album, Outrage, released on 25 November. It gathers up what the band do best with Hashimoto in it, and its opening song, Rise, has become one of their signature pieces. A documentary film built around the story of his return, Shine On - Travelogue of Outrage, was shown in 2010 and issued on DVD in 2011.

The eleventh album, Outraged (2013), follows on directly from Outrage. In 2015 came Genesis I, a special record made of new songs alongside readings of older Japanese rock. February 2017 brought the thirtieth-anniversary box set XXX Box, and that October the twelfth album, Raging Out. Tange regards it as the last of three albums made since Hashimoto's return. Peter Tagtgren, who leads Pain and Hypocrisy, mixed it.

The thirteenth album, Run Riot, was released on 15 April 2020, mixed by Jay Ruston. Its last two songs, White Lightning (respect for Paralex) and Red Skull Rock (respect for Tank), are what their titles say: tributes to bands of the NWOBHM, the music the group were covering when they started, turned back to squarely thirty-eight years later.

Members

The current line-up, as published by the band's official site:

• NAOKI (Naoki Hashimoto) - vocals
• Yosuke Abe - guitar
• Yoshihiro Yasui - bass
• Shinya Tange - drums

Discography (as registered on this site)

• Outrage (EP, 1987)
• Black Clouds (1988)
• Blind to Reality (1989)
• The Great Blue (1990)
• The Final Day (1991)
• Spit (1993)
• Life Until Deaf (1995)
• Who We Are (1997)
• 24-7 (2002)
• Cause For Pause (2004)
• Outrage (2009)
• Outraged (2013)
• Genesis I (2015)
• Raging Out (2017)
• Run Riot (2020)

A note on sources

The facts here rest on the band's own Biography and Discography pages at outrage-jp.com, on the discography published by Universal Music Japan, and on the MusicBrainz entry for the band. Where a Japanese catalogue number could be confirmed, the release date given by the label has been preferred.