Archives: Reviews

: 1) “Contact - Wait Out” 2) Inside the Wire 3) Honour 4) Suspect Hostile 5) 7th Offensive 6) Valour 7) K-Machine 8) A Hollow Truce 9) Pride 10) Covert Ascension

I have been introduced to this Cd as it was a third “…for Victory”, which wouldn’t have surpriised me much as BOLT THROWER, being a relentless, massive war machine varied little and with hardly noticeable changes when they vary at all, aspecially considering “Mercenary” was VERY similar to the previous one, but all in all, considering nobody is able to imitate their sound in the whole world, that would not have been a bad album and I would have bought it with closed eyes. So I spun it up and realized that something actually had changed, and not only on the vocal department. It took me two split seconds to realize Karl Willets was no longer their singer, and one more to identify the vocals as those of Dave Ingram of BENEDICTION fame. I heard he toured with the throwers for a while but didn’t know he was an official member. Luckily he doesn’t bark weakly as he did in BENEDICTION in the last obscenely flappy albums, on the contrary the vocals blends perfectly, with his characteristical unexpressivity and tone which substantially identified Willets as well, and thanksfully, they got back the phlegmy, growling tune. This BOLT THROWER album spots also some previously less definite characteristics such as a incredibly sad, pervasive melody which has all the funereal remembernace feel they proclaim in their epitaph in the folds of the package “The Fallen Braves with their Lives they Gave that will never fade we still remember”. And indeed a desolate, martial apitaph is “Honour, Valour, Pride”, dark as we never heard BOLT THROWER before, yet unrelenting, heavy and perfect as usual. How many bands can you list that cannot be even farly be mimicked despite contless tries? AUTOPSY maybe, old SADUS, the very first CARCASS maybe, but then? BOLT THROWER is still exactly what it was born to be: a unmovable, cyclopic monolith of iron, blackened by gunpowder and countless bullet shots, covered by the moss of countless years in the eternal battlefield of Death Metal. And will forerver remain this way.

1 - Rusted Blood 2 - Filth Chamber 3 - Tormented 4 - Madness And Parasites 5 - Deathscape In Flames 6 - Street Trash 7 - Halo Of Disease 8 - Scratching At The Coffin 9 - Ratbag 10 - Death Runs Red 11 - Wormwind 12 - From Bleeding Skies 13 - Madhouse At The End Of The World

At times, it happe4ns to listen to an album and love it from the very second you hear the first track. Sometimes, like this, you realize you have in your hands a complete masterpiece. It’s still ABSCESS but its not the old ABSCESS, this time there’s something different, perverted in their music, there’s the depraved obscurity of abysmal bad taste that seemed to lack in ABSCESS when compared to AUTOPSY. I can’t describe exactly what I feel while listening to this album but it’s a mix of different emotions, my hands tremble in rapture, my mind floats to those rotting landscapes where only AUTOPSY allowed me to flee, wastelands of disease and sickness. AUTOPSY had class, maybe they’ve been among the 3 most influential bands ever in the history of music (yeah I said it and I confirm), a sort of primeval bad taste which inspired the whole Death metal scene but have never been acknowledged in the right way. And that feeling, that legendary spirit still transpires into every second of this delicious bliss that is “Tormented”. The AUTOPSY magic is back in this music, though leaving ABSCESS their own identity. Crusty, phlegmy and slimy, this is one of those trophies to never be forgotten.

People hated this movie. I don’t think this is much worse than the latest Argento stuff, on the contrary the movie has its best spots right in my countrymate performance. Once again working with romero after Zombi, Romero doesnìt want to stray from his trademark living dead thing so he opts to pay his homage to Poe right with his personal point of view of the case of Dr. Valdemar. I forgot to say this before, but this movie is basically a “split” “tribute” to the most literally sublime master of the horror fiction E.A. Poe. The movie spans for two segments of one hour each. Some good scenes of splatter deserve some attention: the decomposing woman eaten alive by the kitties and the impaled Kaitel in the second one, and the scene where the doctor is killed by wraiths that stab his chest with a tickling device for hypnotism (mesmerization would be more appropriate). The zombie at the end of the first movie is also quite interesting (see picture). Dario should have been in his medieval trip times (see “The Church”) as he adorns his episode with reconstructions of a medieval burg where the protagonist is tortured. The scene settled in this time are quite good, with paesants with oprtting theet, stained with soot and grime, and definitely down to earth. Lots of citations abound here. The protagonist of “The Black Cat” is called Rod Usher (the House of Usher os NOT a name of a Swedish DM band eheh), and the first corpse has been killed with a huge pendulum. When I was watching this movie I had a lot of Deja Vus… actually the stories were already retold on screen by Roger Corman and the unforgettable Vincent price over 40 years ago in a long serie of then B movies (Tales of Terror”, “Pit and the Pendulum”, “Premature Burial”, “Mask of the Red Death” and so on…), and we should not forget Fulci’s “Black Cat”.

Romero and Argento ended up this movie with some arguing, although I don’t know exactly what were these about. To be noted that Special Make-Up Effects are by Tom Savini