BLACK CLOUDS

This is the major-label debut, made less than a year after the self-released EP Outrage of 1987. It appeared on 25 April 1988 with the catalogue number P32P-20171, on Polydor; the LP was 28MM-0631. It widens out what the EP had shown, and yet in the space of that year the band had moved a long way. Set beside the European and American thrash metal records known in Japan at the time, there was nothing about it that fell short. Two of its songs, Under Control Of Law and Edge Of Death, are re-recordings from the EP - which mattered, because the EP had sold out almost at once and was hard to obtain. The reading of Flower Travellin' Band's Slowly But Surely is the other thing that marks the record. Drawing a song from an older generation of Japanese rock is a habit the band would eventually build a whole album around, on Genesis I in 2015. The running order here is the original release's as printed.