Blind Illusion "The Sane Asylum": Bleeding Priest's Bay Area Metal Spotlight 24
- Bleeding Priest
- May 15
- 3 min read
What’s up everybody and welcome to another edition of Bleeding Priest’s Bay Area Metal Spotlight. This time, the spotlight comes from the brand new office headquarters of Hectic / Bleeding Priest Records.
Today’s record is one of the most unusual thrash albums ever recorded, not just in the Bay Area, but anywhere: Blind Illusion’s The Sane Asylum. What a crazy album.
The first time I heard it was at Ted Aguilar’s house around 1989, maybe about a year after it came out. I had heard of Blind Illusion, but never got a chance to see them live because I started going to club shows shortly after they stopped gigging.
At first, I didn’t even like the album. It was just too forward-thinking for my Among the Living-era brain. I was into S.O.D. and straightforward thrash, and this record was way too out there for me at the time, even though I was already a Voivod fan. It took until my early 20s for it to really click. Now, I think it’s one of the greatest Bay Area metal albums ever recorded.
The one thing that held the album back was the production. The guitars are buried in the mix and the tone is paper-thin. The snare sounds strange too. It’s surprising because they recorded it at High Street Studios, where Old Grandad recorded Hocus Corpus, and that album still sounds great. Something just went wrong here. Maybe they went over budget.
But the songs themselves are incredible. These are some of the greatest bizarre metal epics ever recorded. Mark Biedermann is a mad genius.
The drumming from Mike Miner is killer and extremely unusual. He’s not doing standard bludgeoning thrash drumming or just ripping Lombardo-style fills with nonstop double bass. There’s a lot of weird off-the-cuff stuff happening, strange hi-hat work, odd rhythms, and unconventional choices that fit the songs perfectly.
I met Mike Miner briefly about 10 years ago at a Blind Illusion show at the Knockout in San Francisco. Very cool guy, but I never really got the chance to ask what happened after this album or why you never really heard about him again. He’s an amazing drummer.
Of course, Les Claypool and Larry LaLonde are on this record too, before they went on to form Primus shortly afterward. But this album is really all about Mark Biedermann. His songwriting is insane and his guitar playing is phenomenal. I’d easily put him in the top five Bay Area thrash guitarists of all time.
The band never really matched this album afterward. Their later record Wrath of the Gods was excellent, but it didn’t really feel like a thrash album. More just a solid metal record. I’d love to hear them make another album like The Sane Asylum — faster, weirder, more adventurous, and more aggressive.
Right now, they’re working on a new album. In the meantime, Hectic / Bleeding Priest Records are putting out a live album recorded last year at the Exodus / Death Angel show at the UC Theatre. Dave White from Heathen handled vocals, and the set focused heavily on the really early material. The live release will be coming out on vinyl in the next few months.
One thing I always think about is how huge this album could have been with stronger production. Imagine The Sane Asylum with the production quality of Forbidden’s Forbidden Evil or Vio-lence’s Eternal Nightmare, both of which came out the same year. The songs were absolutely there.
If you like forward-thinking thrash and weird, adventurous metal, definitely check this album out.
One last Blind Illusion story. The first time I finally saw them live was on my 21st birthday in 1995. My brothers, sister, and I were walking through North Beach when we saw that Blind Illusion was playing at Morty’s that night. I was beyond excited because I had never seen them before.
Well, technically it was Blind Illusion — but it was the hippie jam-band era version of the group. They opened with the intro from The Sane Asylum, and I thought, “Oh yeah, here it comes.” Then they launched into some long psychedelic jam. Pretty disappointing.
It was still memorable though, because it was also Mark Biedermann’s birthday. We both share the same birthday: May 13th.
Next time, the spotlight will be on Possessed.
–Bleeding Priest
