Music Review: The Coup de Grace – No Stone Unturned/The Art of Survival (Red Decibel Records 2026) Album Review

This new release is a double-LP vinyl retrospective by Minneapolis, MN heavies The Coup de Grace.

The Coup de Grace were a great band.  As background for those who may not know them, The Coup were a thrash metal-meets-90s-hard-alternative-rock band who came up in the fertile Minneapolis music scene in the later 1980s. They post-dated by a few years the more famous bands that arose from that scene (Prince, Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum), and started life as many metal bands did in those days of yore – record a demo tape (“Bombs Away”, 1988), distribute it via tape-trading, and hopefully you can release a single or maybe an album and get out on the road.  Which is exactly what they did: their first vinyl release was a great single on local Minneapolis label Red Decibel Records, “Til The Bitter End/Sad But True”, a cool blue-vinyl 7”, issued in early 1990.  Red Decibel was an indie label founded by Jake Wisely, a writer/scenester who self-published a great metal magazine called Sheet Metal, and then started a label.  The Coup toured on the back of the 7” in Summer ’90, after which their self-tiled debut album was released later in 1990, a joint release by Red Decibel and venerable Minneapolis indie label Twin/Tone, produced (in part) by Soul Asylum mainman Dave Pirner.  The first Coup de Grace LP is a lost classic – a mix of early Metallica and Thin Lizzy filtered through the Minneapolis alt-rock vibe, and the nine songs on that record are uniformly great, a potent mix of thrash-metal-meets-70s-heavy-rock.  Singer/guitarist Jimmy “Coup” Mecherle was a great songwriter and a fine vocalist, late, great guitarist Steve Wresh was an undiscovered guitar hero, and they were ably supported by bassist Kurt Gillispie (who was a big part of the band’s live attack) and drummer Chris Westling.  You can pull that first Coup record up on Spotify or Amazon Music to see how good this record was, or can still find CDs or vinyl copies out there in used record stores or online auctions – a lost metal classic for sure, worth digging up.

But The Coup didn’t last.  The early 90s were a time of change for guitar music as the metal of the 80s shifted to alternative rock and grunge and, sadly, like many metal bands, The Coup de Grace were lost in the shuffle.  Drummer Westling was replaced by the hard-hitting Brett Degendorfer, and Gillispie by a variety of bassists, but the band’s attempts to get a major record deal fell flat.  While the self-titled The Coup de Grace record was reissued via legendary metal label Metal Blade Records in 1992, and the band did shows and toured with bands like Corrosion of Conformity and Cheap Trick, the breakthrough never happened.  They came close to securing a deal with Columbia Records, there was a hard-to-find second record issued in Japan by Japanese label Fems (with Red Decibel), The Art of Survival, and while the band recorded a fair number of demo tracks, before the end of the 90s The Coup faded away, and leader Jimmy Coup went on to play with Andrew WK during WK’s most successful period.

But this was a great band, who should not be forgotten.  Laudably, drummer Brett Degendorfer did the hard work of collecting highlights of some of the band’s unreleased early-mid 90s recordings, plus that hard-to-find second LP, and released it as this new, 2026 double-LP vinyl package (with digital download).  

No Stone Unturned/The Art of Survival is an excellent package.  Two vinyl records, a great, atmospheric album cover (a tree, standing alone in flowing sand), piles of pictures in the gatefold sleeve, inserts with detailed track information and more photos, a digital download card and stickers.  Great liner notes to dig through and eyeball while you crank the music.  Exactly what you want from a vinyl release.

The first LP is mix of unreleased 1990s music from The Coup titled No Stone Unturned.  These recordings feature the core Jimmy Coup/Steve Wresh/Brett D trio, with various bassists on these various early-mid 1990s recordings.  There are some great songs and top-notch playing here – the band had evolved somewhat from the thrash-metal-meets-Thin Lizzy spirit of the first record, and No Stone Unturned carries more of a 1990s Corrosion of Conformity vibe in some tracks, heavy, memorable, groove-oriented songs.   

There are some truly great songs on No Stone Unturned: “Hardway” (muscular COC groove, with some Lizzy-style harmony guitars), “Gotta Get Up” (chunky, shuddering riffing, great chorus), “Going Gone” (a top-notch song, one of my favorites here, huge, propulsive groove, great call-and-response chorus), “Up in Smoke” (melodic, fast, chunky with some more of those Thin Lizzy-ized harmony guitars), “Alone with the Devil” (a dark, fast combo of riffing and melody) and maybe best of all “Somewhere In Between”, which closes Side B of this vinyl record has the feel of a raw, stoner-metal jam, big, huge, grinding, titanic riffs and stomping rhythm).  Criticisms?  Not many, but a couple of the tunes remind too much of other bands – “Damned” and “Dying Days” ape 90s COC pretty closely and “Pressure”, an urgent, catchy rocker, could be a mid-90s Foo Fighters outtake. 

The second vinyl LP here is a reshuffled reissue of the second Coup de Grace album, The Art of Survival.  I remember hunting down this 1995 Japanese-only second Coup record around the time of its release, and being less into it than I had been the 1990 debut record.  Part of the problem was that the band had, as noted above, evolved from the old-school thrash of the debut.  Another was that some of these songs (“God Given”, “Grave World”) had been on an early 90s demo tape that had been circulated a few years earlier, and those versions were better to this writer’s ears than the ‘final’ versions on The Art of Survival.

Either way, a few decades on, The Art of Survival has aged well and sounds better in 2026 than it had in 1995.  The remaster sounds great, the track listing has been reshuffled slightly from the original, one bonus track (“Celtic Song”) deleted from the vinyl, a few songs moved around.  Is it as pure metal as the first record?  No.  But opening song “Ten Feet Tall” is a melodic-but-heavy classic, “Warning Signs”, “All Fall Dead” and “God Given” are catchy and full of heft, and the cover of Thin Lizzy’s 1974 rocker “It’s Only Money” is a great one.  A solid record, and one that didn’t get its due upon release.

Whether you’re an old fan who wondered whatever happened to The Coup de Grace after that ripping debut record, or just looking to discover some cool new (but not THAT new) heavy rock, No Stone Unturned/The Art of Survival is a great document of one of those cool, loud, memorable shoulda-been-bigger heavy rock bands.  All hail The Coup.