Jason Crews is the owner and editor of INFRARED MAGAZINE and a Dallas–Fort Worth-based music journalist and concert photographer. Through INFRARED MAGAZINE and JASON CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY, he covers rock, metal, country, and live music with a focus on album reviews, artist features, concert coverage, and photography. His work is driven by a genuine passion for music and helping artists connect with new audiences through honest writing, strong visuals, and meaningful storytelling.
Rating: 9.5 / 10 Stars
POWER TRIP is: Riley Gale (vocals), Blake Ibanez (lead guitar), Nick Stewart (rhythm guitar), Chris Whetzel (bass), and Chris Ulsh (drums)
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REVIEW – There is a difference between bringing an old sound back and reminding people why that sound was dangerous in the first place. On Nightmare Logic, POWER TRIP do the latter.
The Dallas band never approach crossover thrash as something that needs to be preserved behind glass. They take the speed of thrash, the physical weight of hardcore, massive midtempo grooves, sharp riff transitions, and Riley Gale’s echo-soaked vocals and make every part of it feel immediate. There is history in this record, but very little nostalgia.
Released February 24, 2017 through Southern Lord Recordings, Nightmare Logic arrived four years after POWER TRIP’s full-length debut, Manifest Decimation. Eight tracks and roughly 32 minutes later, the band had created an album that understood one of heavy music’s simplest rules better than most: more does not always mean heavier.
POWER TRIP waste almost nothing here.
The record moves fast when speed matters, slows down when a riff needs room to hit, and understands that the silence between two chords can sometimes be more violent than filling every available second with another note. That control becomes one of the defining qualities of Nightmare Logic. The band never sound like they are throwing riffs at the listener and hoping something sticks. Every acceleration, breakdown, stop, and change in weight feels like it has somewhere to go.
Arthur Rizk’s production is a major reason that balance works. The guitars remain abrasive without collapsing into mud, the bass gives the riffs additional mass, and Chris Ulsh’s drums retain enough physical impact to keep the record connected to hardcore instead of becoming another exercise in polished thrash precision. Gale’s vocals sit inside layers of echo and reverb, sounding less like something placed cleanly on top of the music than another weapon being fired through it.
That becomes clear almost immediately.
“Soul Sacrifice” does not begin by exploding out of the speakers. Rising feedback and underground noise build underneath the opening before the band locks into an advancing rhythm. Once that happens, the track becomes an exercise in momentum control. Sharp riff changes lead into sudden accelerations, but POWER TRIP repeatedly pull the song back under control before driving it forward again.
The speed matters.
The control matters more.
POWER TRIP are not simply proving that they can play fast. They understand exactly when speed increases tension and when slowing down can make the next impact feel heavier.
“Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe)” proves that point immediately.
Instead of trying to outrun “Soul Sacrifice,” POWER TRIP drop into a massive midtempo groove and let every chord strike with full weight. The space between those chords becomes part of the riff. It allows the drums and bass to hit independently instead of disappearing underneath the guitars, turning a relatively straightforward musical idea into one of the album’s most punishing moments.
It is also where Nightmare Logic begins showing why reducing POWER TRIP to riffs, pits, and crossover aggression misses what Riley Gale was doing lyrically.
The song draws from the historical idea of condemned prisoners paying an executioner in hopes of receiving a cleaner death, then turns that image toward political and social apathy. The execution becomes something larger than literal death. It becomes participation in systems that harm the same people keeping them alive.
That makes the title more uncomfortable than it initially appears.
The condemned are paying the executioner.
“Executioner’s Tax” works perfectly well as a metal anthem even without considering anything beyond the riff, but the idea underneath it gives the song another layer. POWER TRIP make something immediately physical while Gale is asking what happens when people become comfortable enough with destructive systems that they start financing their own destruction.
Then “Firing Squad” blows the doors back open.
Short guitar bursts and urgent punk drumming push the album toward full speed again. Where “Executioner’s Tax” creates weight by leaving space, “Firing Squad” works through almost constant movement. The song feels like pressure finally being released after the slower punishment of the track before it.
That contrast is important because POWER TRIP never become dependent on one kind of aggression.
They can crush.
They can sprint.
They know when each one matters.
The title track brings both instincts together.
“Nightmare Logic” moves through a traditional thrash gallop before dropping into a stripped-down hardcore breakdown without making the transition sound like two genres have been forced together. Nothing announces that POWER TRIP are suddenly switching from thrash to hardcore. Both already exist inside the same song.
The thrash sections create speed and panic.
The hardcore sections give that panic somewhere physical to land.
That is where POWER TRIP’s crossover identity feels most natural. The band are not alternating between two musical traditions. They understand where those traditions overlap and build the song directly inside that space.
“Waiting Around to Die” changes the atmosphere.
Prurient’s industrial noise introduction pulls Nightmare Logic somewhere darker before the band even enters, and when the central riff arrives, it carries a more exhausted kind of weight than what came before it. The urgency has not disappeared, but the mood has changed.
The title takes inspiration from Townes Van Zandt’s song of the same name, but the idea expands beyond chemical addiction. Waiting around to die becomes television, distraction, routine, addiction, comfort, or anything else capable of numbing somebody long enough that surrender starts feeling easier than resistance.
That makes “Waiting Around to Die” one of the album’s most important turning points.
Much of the first half of Nightmare Logic focuses on the machinery creating the nightmare. Here, the question begins turning inward.
What happens when people become too comfortable to fight any of it?
That idea gives the song a different kind of anger. The enemy is no longer only political corruption, institutional failure, or some distant system operating above everyone’s head. Complacency becomes part of the problem.
“Ruination” responds by stripping everything back down.
The song is a short, direct hardcore attack centered around dismantling failed and corrupt structures. There is no reason for the arrangement to become more complicated than the idea requires. POWER TRIP hit the point, keep moving, and refuse to decorate it unnecessarily.
The song arrives.
It does what it came to do.
It leaves.
“If Not Us Then Who” takes the album another step forward by moving from recognition toward responsibility.
Drawing from civil-rights-inspired language associated with John Lewis, the song rejects the idea that action can always be postponed until somebody else decides to take responsibility. POWER TRIP have spent much of Nightmare Logic identifying corruption, apathy, institutional power, and the different ways people surrender themselves to those systems. Here, Gale turns the question toward the listener.
Recognizing the problem is not enough.
Chris Ulsh’s lead guitar gives the track another musical dimension, but the larger importance comes from where the song sits inside the album’s argument. Anger without action eventually becomes another form of complacency.
And anger means nothing if it never becomes action.
“Crucifixation” closes the album by stretching the tension farther than anywhere else on the record.
As the longest track on Nightmare Logic, it brings many of the album’s recurring ideas together: institutional power, religious authority, punishment, corruption, and impending collapse. Arthur Rizk contributes additional lead guitar, while POWER TRIP allow the arrangement more room to develop without losing the restraint that keeps the rest of the record so focused.
Even when POWER TRIP give themselves more time, they do not waste it.
That may be the most important thing about Nightmare Logic.
POWER TRIP did not invent thrash metal, hardcore, or crossover. They did not need to.
What they accomplished was more useful than pretending those forms had never existed before. They understood what made them powerful, stripped away what they did not need, and made the remaining pieces feel necessary again.
There is speed here, but speed alone is never the point.
There are breakdowns, but the breakdowns exist because the songs have earned them.
There are enormous riffs, but POWER TRIP know when to stop playing long enough for those riffs to actually hit.
And underneath all of it is an album thinking about what happens when the systems surrounding people become so absurd, corrupt, and destructive that everyday reality begins resembling the nightmare.
That is the logic running through the record.
Executions. Firing squads. Ruination. Institutional authority. Addiction. Distraction. Complacency. Collapse.
But Nightmare Logic is not ultimately an album about surrender.
If anything, Gale spends much of the record attacking surrender.
The darkness matters because there is still something worth resisting for. POWER TRIP are not describing a world that has already ended. They are describing one moving toward the edge while asking whether anybody intends to do something before it gets there.
That gives the album something many politically angry records never find.
Purpose.
The songs never need to stop functioning as heavy music in order to communicate something larger. Gale does not turn POWER TRIP into a lecture with guitars underneath it. The message and the physical reaction happen at the same time.
That balance is one of the reasons Nightmare Logic has aged so well.
Riley Gale’s death in 2020 inevitably changed the emotional weight surrounding the album, but it should not become the reason Nightmare Logic matters. The record had already made its argument. Its reputation was built on the songs, the performances, the riffs, Gale’s conviction, and POWER TRIP’s ability to make crossover thrash feel like something happening in the present rather than something inherited from the past.
The tragedy makes the absence heavier.
It does not create the greatness that was already there.
Nearly a decade after its release, Nightmare Logic still does not sound trapped in 2017. The production remains physical. The riffs still hit. The transitions still feel deliberate. The record still understands exactly when to accelerate and exactly when to let the weight come down.
More importantly, the ideas underneath those riffs have not become historical artifacts either.
Greed is still greed.
Corruption is still corruption.
Complacency is still complacency.
People are still capable of becoming comfortable inside systems working against them.
POWER TRIP took eight songs and roughly 32 minutes to turn all of that pressure into something immediate, memorable, violent, and strangely disciplined. There is almost nothing on Nightmare Logic that feels unnecessary because POWER TRIP understood that heaviness does not come from how much you can put into a record.
Sometimes it comes from knowing exactly what to leave out.
The riffs still carry their weight.
The warnings still apply.
The nightmare never really ended.
That is what makes Nightmare Logic a Modern Classic.
For more information on POWER TRIP, visit:
www.PowerTripSL.bandcamp.com
www.Facebook.com/PowerTripTX
www.X.com/PowerTripTX
www.Instagram.com/PowerTripTX
www.YouTube.com/@PowerTripTX
www.Spotify.com/Artist/PowerTrip
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