WARHAMMER - No Beast So Fierce…

Warhammer - No Beast So Fierce…

11 songs
48:17 minutes
***** ***
High Roller

Bandpage

I might as well retype the Hellkommander review I wrote two months ago. Just like the Brazilians, Warhammer’s latest album is also released on vinyl by High Roller Records and share the same adoration for Hellhammer. In fairness sake, it must be said that Warhammer from Germany were the first band to pay such homage to the Swiss primitive thrashers, releasing four albums between 1997 and 2002, some of them even on the big label Nuclear Blast. Then Warhammer broke up, just to reform in 2006. Last year they self-released their comeback album No Beast So Fierce…, but found in High Roller a company who gives it now a second take for vinyl collectors. The LP comes with an additional seven inch record featuring cover versions of Venom (Poison), Bathory (The Return Of Darkness And Evil) and Poison (Sphinx). The latter was an early German death thrash metal band and should of course not be confused with the much hated hair metal poser band. I remember back in the Eighties when CDs had bonus tracks to get people convinced not to buy vinyl anymore. How the times have changed!

Still familiar with some of Warhammer’s earlier works, I knew of course not to expect any stylistic changes. That would be contrary to the philosophy of the musicians’ who started disliking Celtic Frost ever since Into The Pandemonium in 1987 when this Hellhammer successor band all of a sudden integrated complex songwriting. You will have to look long and hard to find anything fanciful on No Beast So Fierce…. The songs all adopt an either proto doom snail pace, dragging with these really rumbling guitars and devastation all in their way, or are high speed death thrash songs that lack all of the subtlety that this genre later evolved.

Experts will hardly find a consensus if one should bother with a band whose sole artistic mission is to copy another band’s sound, but then Hellhammer never even released a longplayer when they were active, even though there an expansive double CD with all kinds of demo recordings was released a few years back in Century Media.

In some ways, I prefer Warhammer who continue consequently the task that Hellhammer never really came to finish. And in times where thrash and death metal albums all too often come with an incredible sound but lack the spirit of the early years, the nostalgic metal fan who actually grew up with those bands in the mid-Eighties will find much to like on No Beast So Fierce….

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