Have you ever listened to an album from a band whose body of work you are at least a little familiar with and thought: "Wow, this is what they have been working towards all these years?"

I am sure at least a few of you have had that experience. Listening to The Blackening the feeling has come back and I was mentally kicking myself for not getting it sooner. It came out in March of 2007, but I am only now, following their first career Grammy nomination (for the song "Aesthetics of Hate")  checking it out. The band sounds fresh, young, and re-energized as compared to some of their other output.

Machine Head is a band that has been around the scene for over a decade, having released their first LP, Burn My Eyes, way back in 1994. I remember picking that album up and being a little less than impressed. I am not sure what it was, I like it more now.

I picked up their sophomore release, The More Things Change, and this completely changed my perception; I loved this album, warts and all. Then came The Burning Red. I did not care for this album, save for one song ("The Blood, The Sweat, The Tears"). My interest waned, and in retrospect it may have been partially due to the change of producer and mixer to Ross Robinson and Terry Date from Colin Richardson. It turned out to be the only time they worked with them. Richardson returned to the mixin board, and Robb Flynn took over producer duties on the past two releases.

It was during this era, I got to see the band a couple of times, with the first being just prior to the release of Supercharger, an album I never bothered to pick up. I heard a couple songs off a sampler disk from the show, and while not terrible, they were a little too nu-metal for what I expected from them. A few years later they released their next album, Through the Ashes of Empires, which I picked up for some inexplicable reason. Turned out to be a solid album and a step up for the band.

What does this have to do with The Blackening? Well, all of those albums and experiments seemed to have been in preparation for this. In short, this is a spectacular example of modern thrash that just puts it all out there. The sound is laced with that classic old school sound, blended with modern production techniques and a fearlessness that is completely infectious.

It is rare that a band would produce what is quite possibly the best album this deep into their career, that is usually a distinction held by a one of their first two or three releases. This is an album that really put Machine Head back on my radar.