Released: March 22, 1987
Among the Living moves fast, but speed alone does not explain why its songs turn whole rooms into participants. Scott Ian’s rhythm guitar is locked down to the smallest gap, Charlie Benante’s drums change direction on command, and the band rarely lets a riff blur at the edges. Yet the record never sounds sealed off. Released in March 1987 and produced by Anthrax with Eddie Kramer, it keeps making space for another voice to join in. How did Anthrax make music this exact sound so communal?
Benante sits at the centre of it. He wrote most of the music, and many of these songs reveal a drummer’s mind at work: guitar patterns broken into accents, turns, and hard stops instead of long streams of notes. The title track enters at a menacing walk. Joey Belladonna fires the opening “Disease!” lines over a broad riff, then the tempo snaps upward and Benante’s double kick begins tracing Ian’s picking. Even at full speed, the band keeps inserting cues that a listener can grab onto.
“Caught in a Mosh” makes that design easy to hear. Frank Bello’s opening bass phrase gives the song its identity before the guitars cut across it. The verse leaves sharp gaps around Belladonna’s lines, matching the timing of an argument where nobody lets the other person finish. When the gang vocals enter, one person’s complaint becomes something an entire room can own.
That crowd-level communication depends on Belladonna. His high register clears Ian’s down-picked guitars, while his diction keeps the lyrics understandable at speed. On “I Am the Law,” he plays Judge Dredd with the projection of a comic-book narrator, stretching the title across a broad, stomping refrain. Dan Spitz answers with quick, high-register lead breaks that add colour without pulling the song away from its main riff.
Scott Ian’s lyrics also give the audience concrete images to latch onto. The title track pulls Captain Trips from Stephen King’s The Stand, while “A Skeleton in the Closet” turns Apt Pupil into a breathless account of buried guilt. “Efilnikufesin (N.F.L.)” hides “nice fucking life” backwards in its title as Belladonna spells out the destruction caused by John Belushi’s addiction. Ian writes these subjects in plain, vivid language, making every reference easy to recognize and repeat.
The clearest audience cue arrives in “Indians.” Benante’s tom-led opening establishes its own rhythm before the full band enters. Later, he drops into the “war dance” section and the group chant takes over. The chant lands because the rhythm changes beneath it; the song teaches the room what to do before the line comes around again.
“A.D.I./Horror of It All” shows another side of that control. Spitz’s acoustic introduction clears away the rhythm guitars before the full band enters a song written after Cliff Burton’s death. Belladonna pulls back some of his usual theatrical reach, while the melodic guitar lines and slower opening section leave the loss exposed. When the faster riffing returns, the song retains that connection to a specific person.
Kramer’s dry mix keeps every cue audible. The guitars crowd the centre, but Bello’s bass stays separated, and Benante’s kick drums do not dissolve underneath them. Anthrax rejected an early, reverb-heavy direction, and the final mix leaves almost no haze between the playing and the listener.
So how did Anthrax make such tightly controlled thrash sound communal? By treating precision as a set of instructions. Bello announces the entrances, Benante marks every turn, Ian gives the stops hard edges, and Belladonna tells the room when to answer. The audience is already written into Among the Living. All it has to do is shout back.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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