KREATOR — Pleasure to Kill (review)

KREATOR — Pleasure to Kill album cover Album · 1986 · Thrash Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
AtomicCrimsonRush
Speed. Aggression. Brutality. Lethal.

These are all words me and my mates used to utter listening to this killer album. It was so fast and extreme it really knocked everyone off their perch. The songs were chock full of nasty lyrics and the singing was gutteral and German accented.

The lead guitar work is incredible throughout, the drum blastbeats are deadly and above all the rhythmic riffs are always skull melting. It opens with wind howling, ethereal voices and sweet acoustics, then it breaks into the blazing Ripping Corpse. The sadistic lyrics are screeched out by Mille who thrashes the axes. Rob is great on bass and Ventor is a powerhouse on relentless speed drumming. Everythign is turned up to a blazing tempo as fast as i had heard, even as fast as Slayer. It was a very influential album for all these reasons and showed that Germany was capable of some extreme hardcore thrash.

Death Is Your Saviour is another speedy track, and it gets faster as it progresses. At times it sounds like a machine grinding, hence the term grindcore, and the lyrics are always about killing, death and brutality, so nobody took them seriously as a result, unless you were into the extreme end of thrash.

Pleasure To Kill was the ultimate classic from the album that they played live and had the crowd screaming back kill! i love the drum fills on this, and the way the riff chops and fractures with odd time sig shifts. This is as technical as they got in these early years. 1986 was a groundbreaking year for thrash with the rise of Metallica, Slayer, Onslaught, Exodus, Anthrax, Megadeth, Sodom and Kreator. These bands simultaneously crushed the glam metal scene. Destruction were even faster than Kreator but none would have the same impact as this album seemed to generate. One thing that stood out was the way they broke the music up with half time feels and very odd riffing. The lead breaks were brilliant too, but the vocals were nothing like anyone had heard, so gutteral and raspy. Riot of Violence has an awesome driving riff with lead guitar squeals. When I was into this thrash this was one of my favourites as it was not just breakneck speed but had some wonderful lead breaks and a powerdriving riff. It does speed up in the chorus but somehow the mixing allows one to hear every note.

The Pestilence has powerful drumming in the intro and then locks into a blitzkrieg of galloping riffs with extreme distortion before launching into high speed rhythms.

Carrion is an underrated track with a very fast lead solo intro over blastbeats and double kicking with aggressive speed. This is as furious as metal gets, definitely for the hardcore speed metal freak.

At the time I was into this metal I was actually to the point where I was beginning to mellow into a different style of music, but this was irresistible, and will be hailed as a thrash classic forever.

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