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Kreator > Endless Pain > Reviews > Nightcrawler
Kreator - Endless Pain

Blood of Jesus one thousend people fall the priest - 85%

Nightcrawler, November 9th, 2004

Kreator started their career right away on a very high note with "Endless Pain", a pretty damn brutal release for 1985. German thrash is general was raging at the time, led mainly by this band and Destruction, though the latter were more into the raw early black metal than the proto-death of Kreator, though they were really basically doing the same thing - tearing your face off with vicious, raw and aggressive thrashing riffage, and Kreator definitely standing out as the better of the two, at least around 1985, the time of Destruction's somewhat uninspired "Infernal Overkill" LP.

"Endless Pain" just never stops to kick your ass, and shows an incredibly young and unexperienced but hungry and inspired trio of evil thrashers, wanting nothing more than to kick the asses of countless fans with lyrics that tell of evil, bloody and brutal subjects, and riffs enhancing that atmosphere, in a band originally started as a less-than-serious pastime.

As they were still quite young and unexperienced, there's a noticable lack of variety in between the songs, and some of it is slightly less memorable than what the bay area was doing at the time, for example, when monsters like "Bonded By Blood" for example were coming out. And speaking of which - the choruses of Kreator's "Total Death" and Exodus' "Strike of the Beast"... "Try! To run! Or hide! From the death!" VS "Try! To run! Or fight! Off the strike! Of the beast" With the exact same vocal melody. Who ripped off who? I don't care, cause both sound awesome.

But anyway. This slight lack of variety does little to hurt the album, cause what it lacks for in that factor it more than makes up for in plain awesome riffage. "Tormentor", for example, is the best fucking song on here, and that main riff is in total "Bonded By Blood" or "Kill 'Em All" style, catchy as fuck, while the rest of the song brutalizes you completely. This album does that pretty damn well, bringing out quite a few really catchy and simultaneously crushing riffs. Other examples would be "Cry War" and "Son of Evil", but it's all pretty fucking good.

Other highlights are "Storm of the Beast", which has some wicked tempo changes, and the short but sweet "Bonebreaker" with a catchy, fast power chord main riff almost sounding like something out of the NWOBHM. And of course the headbanging madness of "Flag of Hate", probably the second greatest track on here. But really, there ain't a single weak song in the bunch, so if you like your early raw, brutal death/thrash from the infamous Germany, then you just cannot possibly go wrong with this, and the fact that their English was quite incompetent at the time (see review title - quote from "Son of Evil") just adds to the charm of early Kreator.