Maximum Metal Rating Legend

Drunkard - Hellish Metal Dominate - 2004 - Blackmetal.com

Track Listing1. Drunk With Satan 2. War Unleashed 3. Ride Thru Hell/Thrashing Vein 4. Spiked Fist 5. Sequel To Blasphemy 6. Alcoholic Death 7. Discoblood 8. Alkowarriors 9. Happy Hell 10. Sell Your Soul

It's taken a decade of black metal to resuscitate thrash. Dead and bloated since the early 90s due to it's own excesses - overtly technical songs, way too clean production values, and too many bands riding the coattails of the bay area bands for the chance of making a career out of it had basically neutered this genre in it's original form by the end of the 80s. The veteran bands all either broke up or lost the plot entirely, and many of the promising new acts realized they where whipping a dead horse and morphed into death metal.

It's took bands like Aura Noir, Desaster, Gehennah, and Nifelheim to remind us that thrash at it's rawest and most reckless is freakin' awesome. Fuck all the advances in technology: Kreator, Hellhammer, Slayer, Sodom, Merciless, Destruction - they all had it right on their first albums. Primitivism is a virtue, and "musical progression" is just a euphemism for getting old and
wimping out.

This is my first experience with Drunkard, who are a blackthrash band from Greece. Stylistically different from any of their countrymen I've heard, these guys have no patience for the subtle esoteric atmospherics that bands like Necromantia and Rotting Christ purvey. They are too busy obsessing with all things metal - booze, bulletbelts, and satan. The difference between the bands that pioneered this style in the 80s and a band like Drunkard is that the 80's bands were just trying to make a racket with very rudimentary musical skills - very "punk rock" in spirit. The bands of today are all better musicians technique-wise, and play this way by choice. So what you have here are bands that are creating forgeries of what their mentors created in the past, but in a way so remarkable that they've gained an
artistic merit of their own.

Sorry to get all prozak on you guys, as this band really doesn't need any deep intellectual analysis.This review could just as easily be summed up by saying: "Drunkard fucking kills. Buy this album, drink a lot of beer, and crank this up loud." Oh yeah..."Hail Satan!"


--Timmy D. 05.06.05