OUTRAGE Trivia — 13 Entries
13 sourced facts about OUTRAGE.
Trivia
Outrage were formed 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. The line-up that has lasted to this day came together in 1986, when Ito left and Naoki Hashimoto, who had been in another band, took his place.
The debut EP, Outrage, released in 1987 on the band's own label Pile Driver Records, later came to be known by the nickname Peke Rage, taken from the design of its sleeve.
The debut EP is remembered as an answer sent to Metallica from Nagoya. The band's own biography is careful to add that it was not an imitation: like Metallica, Outrage 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.
Of the guitar solo in Step On It, from the debut EP, the band's own biography says it is hard to believe a boy in his teens worked it out and played it. It adds that at a time when shouting was taken for granted in thrash, Hashimoto's voice, rough but carrying a melody squarely, caught the ear.
The debut 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, Black Clouds, and the four original recordings were put on CD in 1997 as the second disc of It's Packed!! - 10th Anniversary Live & Rare Edition.
Black Clouds, the 1988 major-label debut, includes a reading of Flower Travellin' Band's Slowly But Surely. 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, which pairs new songs with covers of their forebears.
The fourth album, The Final Day (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 then the band had struggled to reach the sound they wanted; this time, they have said, it arrived at the very first test recording.
River, from The Final Day, is the band's first outright ballad. According to their own biography, Naoki Hashimoto refused at first to record it.
After Naoki Hashimoto left in 1999, the three who remained decided not to replace him and carried on as a trio, with Yoshihiro Yasui taking the lead vocals. The band have since acknowledged that, looking back, the change was one they needed, and that had the four of them carried on unchanged they might have broken up instead.
Hashimoto returned at a twentieth-anniversary concert held at Club Citta' in Kawasaki on 2 September 2007. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, but the response was such that his return was made permanent in 2008.
Deadbeat comes from Cause For Pause (2004), made during the years when Hashimoto was away and the band worked as a trio, and it was also issued as a single. Their own biography notes that hearing Hashimoto sing it since his return, it sounds unmistakably like an Outrage song.
Raging Out, the twelfth album, released in 2017, was mixed by Peter Tagtgren, who leads Pain and Hypocrisy. Shinya Tange is said to regard it as the last of the three albums made since Naoki Hashimoto's return.
The thirteenth album, Run Riot (2020), closes with White Lightning (respect for Paralex) and Red Skull Rock (respect for Tank). As their titles say outright, both are tributes to bands of the NWOBHM, the music Outrage were covering when they started, turned back to squarely.