Review Destruction - Day of Reckoning 2011

Destruction is what follows when my cat, Kakan (Cookie), walks the earth. She has destructed too many books keep count, as well as my computer and a lot of house accessories. In music, however, Destruction is a German thrash metal band who has had a pretty interesting history in Hallowed. In our fourth issue of the printed magazine this band not only had an article on 3½ pages published (which was a lot back then when we only had 80 pages every three months to work with), but also two reviews. The thrash loving Silfver, who also did the interview, absolutely loved it and gave the newly released ‘Metal Discharge’ 10/10. However, big brother Daniel trashed it with a humiliating 0/10. The truth is probably somewhere in between but with such a diverse history in Hallowed, the first seven grade score must be an interesting one…

German thrash have always been the European answer to bay Area Thrash and with four leading acts, being this band as well as Sodom, Tankard and Kreator, it has been a pretty popular genre as well. Overall, what distinguish German thrash from the American is that it generally is a bit heavier with more grinding guitars and another form of – shall we call it hate (?) – in the vocals. Overall, the German thrash is quite similar to death metal. It’s angrier and harder but not necessarily as raw in the production. Take this album as an example – now I’m no big fan of Deastruction, but looking back at their albums before the comeback in 2000 they had a simpler and cheaper production. However, here on ‘Days of Reckoning’ they sound better than ever. Thanks to the production they get the instruments to sound more powerful and this makes the whole album sound stronger. The album doesn’t get that flat and messy feeling as their collegues in Assassin for example, everything sounds better like this and the album can easily take control over you and thrash everything in sight into small pieces that’s only fit for the junkyard. Very few American thrash album does this.

The music is as music very simple and often the songs are extremely repetitive and wear out the riffs in each and every song. However, the songs themselves isn't very alike each other. This is quite unusual considering what a big problem this normally is in the thrash genre. Here it's no big problem and I feel they try a lot of new things with this album - to be a thrash album it's pretty experimental and inventive with different sound effects and strange guitarr sounds. It feels very thrash metal at the same time as it's something different from most other thrash. Not necessarily because it's extra good or something like that, but because it has its own voice in some way.

Vocaly it sounds as it usually does when Schmier does his singing. Like a hoarse oldster shouting at youths picking apples from his garden. Or like a thousand wales about to suffocate. Or like a big German fellow possesed by evil spirits. Schmiers voice is hoarse and angry, he's sounds so bad he can pierce your soul the way he sings on this album. But not because he's a good singer. He's not likely to seduce photo models with his "baby smooth" voice, it would be more likely he'll convert them to death angels instead. Mostly the vocals and music thinks about the same and wants more or less the same things - but now and then they go on different picknicks and as they do so, this otherwise pretty well made album sounds very amateurish, bad and uninteresting. Good then that it's not a big problem with the album because if they had done this more than they do, I probaby would have trashed them big time. It's extremely aggrevating when music and vocals don't work together, especially when it happen in this genre.

If you've already peeked at the score you've seen it's neither a seven or a one, which is our highest and lowest score nowadays. Instead the points stays in the middle of the scale and the reason to this is that it is a very good album, an album that distinguish itself in the genre it belongs to. But it's also an album that demands your preferences to stretch into the thrash genre - or at least the fast death metal. And when albums demands this they can't get more points than what this album have. I like the production, and also the fact that it isn't an album with eleven songs sounding more or less the same. However, I think the music is too simple and the album tends to get a bit too long. To make me happy they would have needed to shave off ten minutes or so, but that might just be me. When it comes to the vocal parts I think they are okay. You can tell Schmier sounds the way he wants, but how good it sounds when he does so is another question. Anyway, he doesn't ruin or better anything with his vocals, they go more or less hand in hand with the grade.

This is an album that can take a really big grip on you and thrash you into whatever it wants. But it's not an album made for everyone, so it demands you to be the right person to really be able to thrash you. If you're not the right person to be thrashed, you'll probably be the one ending up thrashing - that is this album (in to a dumpster). The days of reckoning needs you to have basic first grade school knowledge in counting. 1+X=?. 7-X=?. X=3 - so how much is ?.

HHHHHHH

Destruction Day of Reckoning

Destruction
Day of Reckoning