Calamitas

Right off-the-bat, never managed to come to terms with the bourbon; find it stickily semi-sweet, leaving this not very pleasant aftertaste every time, unerringly, like it wants you to acknowledge its not very positive effect on you, also daring you to give it another try as sipping it is not exactly the biggest calamity in the whiskey world… no it’s not, but I prefer to try a band of that moniker, especially if that band hails from Germany, Bavaria to be more precise, where a small glass of bourbon is supposedly not an unpardonable sin, amongst the profuse beer-drinking sessions.

These whiskey lovers came out just this once, but they made sure they left a trace on the old school speed metal horizon with this dynamic, restless 5-tracker which combines the atmospheric complexity of Scanner’s “Terminal Earth” with the less patient, more impetuous shootouts of works like Helloween’s “Walls of Jericho” and Warrant’s “First Strike”. A short orchestral inauguration opens the proceedings, before the guys start shredding with force and passion on “High in the Sky”, a possible reference to “Ride the Sky” from the mentioned Helloween opus, the vigorous thundering bass immediately detected, the bass player racing with the guitarists eagerly, the band never losing the hyper-active veneer from sight, moshing enthusiastically for 7.5-min. “Paralysed” consists of two parts, the first one being a soporific “acoustics vs. leads” idyll, a near-all-instrumental piece until the very end when the singer shows up to partly ruin it since his levelled dispassionate clean timbre fails to generate any emotion, not even a tad of it, the entire time…

yep, a stooge we have behind the mike to an extent, but the second part comes alive with vivid dynamic rhythms, an optimistic soaring ride the vocalist desirably helped by his comrades on the simple but effective chorus. More ambition displayed right after with the more entangled saga “Merciless Speed” on which merciless speed per se is hard to come by, but the number is lively enough, again giving plenty of opportunities to the four-stringer to enchant everyone, the latter even beating Helloween’s Markus Grosskopf at his own game, unleashing bedazzling bassisms at every opportunity. The only genuinely mid-tempo occurrence here is the sinister bouncy “Holy War”, a near-thrashy walkabout which grumpiness is cured by the headbanging winger ...sorry, winner “Wings of Destruction”, the prototypical “eagle fly free” hymn with the speedy rhythms, the sing-along chorus, the optimistic message (really?), and again this bass prodigy, the man deserving a truckload of medals for his omnipresent wall-tumbling burps.

A somewhat curious entry this one, largely due to the bass-dominated scenery, something not very typical for a speed metal slab. The murky production betrays its deep underground status, but the lads were hardly ever aiming at the spotlight, remaining in the near-gems cauldron of the German metal roster in the company of other similarly-styled outfits like Mefisto, Heavenward, Harridan, Charan… however, our friends here proved the most ambitious of this batch, and just a few months after this demo’s release they were already named Embargo, and subsequently left a sizeable legacy of three full-lengths in the 90’s, all confidently-executed retro speed metal roller-coasters. Bravo! And cheers! First with Bavarian beer, then with bourbon! Cause this is some way to avoid all groovy calamities and numetal disasters on the road… even if said road merely makes circles around this cosy haven known as obscureland.