This band is from Turkey, but if you just had the audio to go on, you’d swear that they’re German… Kreator/Destruction worship abounds as Thrashfire blazes through 12 songs of speedy Thrash that could have come straight off of a Teutonic Thrash tribute compilation. Did I say Thrash enough times there? I probably did. The thing is, that’s what Thrashfire is all about. If you’re looking for influences other than Thrash, you’re not going to find any here. One of the problems that Thrashfire has is that they operate primarily in the high speed realm. Most, if not all, of their songs sound similar. Outside of the different guitar solos, this could easily be twelve different versions of the same track. The main culprit is the drumming. When you’re blasting away through a dozen tracks, unless you do some serious tempo changes between them, it gets very hard to distinguish between songs. Some of the songs have stupid titles and lyrics, but given that the band is from Turkey and shamelessly aping German Thrash, I’d say that they’re going to get a free pass from me on that. My German is bad and my Turkish is worse. Unless you’re a native English speaker or you have some seriously homoerotic lyrics (accidentally, hopefully…), I’m generally not going to deduct for bad lyrics. I’ll give them credit for trying and for having some decent influences. Being a Thrash band from Turkey isn’t likely to be the easiest thing these days, particularly with the country slowly becoming more and more Islamic. The Sharia Police doesn’t take too kindly to Metalheads. Still, a band ultimately lives or dies by the quality of their music. This is good but not great. There is a ton of potential here but they just have to find their sound.

To say that Lamentations of the Ashen is boring and slow is like saying that Stalin might have killed a few people. It’s the understatement of the decade. If Varg from Burzum had decided that he wanted to do an album of his favorite Sunn O))) covers during the time period in which he recorded Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, this is pretty much what it would sound like. It has the same minimalistic characteristics of Burzum but at 1/10th the speed. Interest in the music is lost about five minutes into the second song. The first track, “…of Wraiths in White,” is just an intro (clocking in at a little over five minutes), so most listeners would suffer through that in hopes that things not only pick up but get better. Sadly, that doesn’t happen. It just continues to drone on and on and on. This album is about as exciting as being paralyzed from the neck down. I had to listen to this in chunks, taking in one song a day in hopes that the boredom generated by the music wouldn’t cause me to fall asleep in the middle of it. Even doing that, this was borderline torture to sit through.

For Zobibor’s first official release (the band’s only previous material is their Sodomatic Rape 2006 demo), this short (13 minutes) four-song EP has a fairly good sound. The guitars have a little more low-end in them than the average Black Metal band and they also have audible bass guitar on here too. Musically, this is fast and furious Punk-influenced Black Metal with some kick ass guitar soloing. I was never a big fan of guitar solos (I’m still not) but when a band does something well, I’m going to point it out. The soloing is pretty deadly. It hits hard, sounds well thought out and doesn’t degenerate into guitar wankery like so many solos do. I don’t know what took them five years to release new material, but this is enough to get me interested in hearing more from them. One of the problems with a short release is that there isn’t a whole lot to judge them on. I don’t have the demo (according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, it was limited to 50 copies) so I can’t say if they’ve progressed any since 2002, which is the listed year of their founding. This is short, tight, well-produced and it also serves the purpose it was probably intended: to get you interested in hearing more.

I must have done something to piss Ray off, because he has once again sent me something to review from Sleazy Rider. That label seems to have a knack for finding and releasing albums by the most raging homosexuals ever. Everything I’ve ever heard from this label has sucked Godzilla’s giant mutant reptile penis, and Monster 5 is no exception. For those of you who’ve never heard of Theodore Ziras before (and unless you’re an employee of Sleazy Rider, you probably haven’t), he’s one of those guys who is supposed to be an awesome guitar player, but all he ever produces is unlistenable, obnoxiously pretentious guitar wanker albums that only fags who like to masturbate with their seven-string, 24-fret penis extensions could enjoy. I had to suffer through eleven tracks of pretentious guitar wankery that made me want to kill every guitarist and burn every guitar ever made. Theodore Ziras made me listen to Japanese Gangsta Rap for three days straight because it was the furthest thing from a guitar album that I could find. I had to physically stop myself from booking a flight to Greece just to cut this guy’s hands off. Of course, knowing guitar wankers like I do, this loser would learn how to play guitar with his fucking feet and I’d have to make a second trip out there to cut those off, too. The only possible audience this might have is with other guitar wankers. For them, this album would be like buying the contents of a storage locker at an auction for $20 and finding a treasure trove of gay porn inside. For everyone else, this is a form of pain and suffering that even a Miley Cyrus / Jonas Brothers / Selina Gomez triple-bill couldn’t equal.

My first impression of On the Wings of Time is that there is a lot of groove on this album and they have a nice, thick, heavy guitar tone. In fact, the guitars are the loudest thing here. They drown out pretty much everything else. This is a guitar-based band so that isn’t actually bad. In fact, you’d want it to be that way. The thing is, when you have a bass solo (such as on the song “Darkness & Disguise”), it really sounds weird when the solo kicks in and it’s conspicuously quiet compared to the guitars. The vocals are also pretty low. This isn’t generally a problem, but there are times when you can’t understand the singing because the guitars drown it out. When you have a vocalist who is singing in a clean voice and in a way that you can generally understand what he’s saying, it distracts and unless you have a lyric sheet, the song sounds disjointed. You know he’s saying something, but you just don’t know what. Musically, this is very groove-laden. The riffing is memorable and it gets your head banging in time with the music. Still, even with that, the album is a bit overwhelming. The songs are almost all over five minutes each. One clocks in at about three minutes (“Weightless”) but there are two that clock in at over nine minutes (“Valley of the Kings” and “The Sleeping Prophet”). Taken in small doses, Black Skies is fairly deadly. Trying to listen to this album from beginning to end, though, is a pretty daunting task.

Three minutes into this and I was already bored. That’s never good. Beating one riff into the floor over and over again doesn’t make it more interesting. The fact that it’s not brutal, aggressive or even heavy doesn’t help either. This is so passive that it makes This Empty Flow sound like Bonded by Blood-era Exodus. Hunter is about as interesting as watching paint dry and I have the distinct feeling that I’m not on the appropriate hallucinogenic drugs to make this album worthwhile. The final track, “Never Land” is supposed to be a Sisters of Mercy cover, but it sounds nothing like the original. Then again, I don’t think taking two riffs from Sisters of Mercy and beating them to death for thirteen minutes qualifies as a cover. A desecration, maybe, but not a cover. Heirs is referred to as “Post-Doom” in their press release, but this isn’t Doom. Some of the members of this band may have wanted to play Doom at some point, but my guess is that they sucked so bad that they had to put the word “post” in front of it to sound like they intended to be this pointless. Hunter sounds like background music for those shitty art house films that try to be all “bleak” and “symbolic,” but are essentially exercises in deconstructed masturbation. How this band made it to a second release - and found a label to release it - is beyond me.

Let’s see… Brutal, down-tuned guitars? Check. Guttural, monotone vocals? Check. Originality checked in at the door? Check. Flesh Throne, you are cleared for takeoff. It’s nice to know that someone still thinks aping Incantation is a great idea, because I’m sure Darkthrone and Burzum are getting kind of sick of being blamed for all the shitty, sub-par Metal music that’s out there. Flesh Throne is essentially cookie-cutter Brutal Death Metal that huge numbers of bands produced back in the early ’90s when Black Metal was still “underground.” Going against the trend is admirable, but ultimately you live and die by how good your music is. Onslaught isn’t horrible. It’s just unoriginal. The songs chug along at a steady pace, pounding your face in like a giant pile driver. The vocals are utterly bestial and guttural to the point of unintelligibility. All things that have been done to death. There aren’t any blatant technical mistakes, but nothing here pops out and says “now that was fucking cool!” (A sin that Incantation committed any number of times, too). For a jaded Metal fan like me, generic Death Metal gets my dick about as hard as watching an hour of Masterpiece Theater on PBS. Since Masterpiece Theater is essentially the anti-Viagra, Onslaught sits firmly in erectile dysfunction city. Unless you absolutely must own every Death Metal release, you can skip this and not miss out on anything.

I didn’t know anything about Ptahil prior to hearing this, but I definitely like the band’s brand of Black Heavy Metal. These guys are Old School and you can really tell that they have a lifelong Metal background. If Black Sabbath was brutally raped by Slayer at a Celtic Frost concert, the resulting abomination child would sound a lot like For His Satanic Majesty’s Glory. This is some brutal, bass-heavy, neck-snapping, gets-your-head-banging-from-the-first-riff, Satanic as fuck Heavy Fucking Metal. This is what I wished Grim Reaper sounded like when See You In Hell came out (not that See You In Hell sucked, but I wanted it to be heavier and more evil). Honestly, this is one of those albums that you listen to and wonder why it doesn’t come with a fucking neck brace. The only thing comparable would be if Usurper did an album covering Hell, Grim Reaper and Brocas Helm songs.

Grindy Death Metal bands like Dead don’t do a lot for me. One of the reasons for this is that a lot of times they do something that makes it impossible to take them seriously. A song titled “Tits”? Really? You guys must get laid less often than Anal Blast. The rest of the song titles and lyrics are equally lame, too. Maybe I’m the wrong person to do these kinds of reviews because I take listening to Metal music seriously. When I listen to it, I want my head torn off. I want things brutal and occult. I want Satan himself coming out of my speakers to rip my soul from my body. If I want humor with musical accompaniment, I can listen to a Weird Al CD and get all the laughs I need. Musically, this is pretty competently executed, but the “humor” parts don’t help. The brutal Death/Grind is hard-hitting, but the shitty lyrics, stupid samples (such as in “A Beer” or “Short but Slim”) and general lack of seriousness brings this down. Joke bands only go so far before the novelty wears off, and for me the novelty of Dead wore off almost immediately.