This untitled split album compiles previously released yet, sometimes, hard-to-get material from two cult-acts within the world of Thrash-Heavy-Fucking-Metal Violence. There’s Guerra Total at the one hand, a total-war horde from the capital of Colombia, and Metalucifer at the other, once started as a side-project for Japan’s finest Sabbat. French Pop Music label Forgotten Wisdom Productions (oops, are you gonna finish me?...), sorry, it’s, of course, a fabulous Extreme Underground Metal label – anyway, it gets released via Forgotten Wisdom Productions with only few information, yet with fine pictures of all members involved. That suffices, I think.
---------------------------------
The five elegies by Bogota-based choir Guerra Total are re-recorded versions of material from the earliest years of this decade. It means that the material is not completely new. But hey, the sound seems better, and much more brutal. This sonic filth continues the band’s typifying characteristics, being that superb First Wave-alike form of Eighties oriented Blackened Thrash Metal. It’s Speed’n’Rock’n’Roll, with all necessary ingredients: pounding rhythms, fierce riffs, barb-wired solos, smashing drums, raw voices, including the few high-pitched Heavy Metal shouts, and so on. Some might say it does lack of originality. Well, that’s correct. It does lack of renewing progression. But I do the f*ck not care. I adore aural nastiness à la Venom, Kreator, Bulldozer, Sodom, Bewitched, Infernö and so on – you know what I am talking about – and such stuff needs the initial song writing and primal execution of old to make sure it fits. Otherwise it would smell like roses, and all we need is the stench of rotting cadavers, don’t we?!
Oh yes, in case of interest: I wrote a review on Cthulhu Zombies & Anti-Cosmic Black Goats (Iron Shield Records, 2014), which was appeared on the site’s update of December 31st 2014.
---------------------------------
Metalucifer too appear with five compositions, though be it in their Japanese version. The three first ones are taken from their 1996 Heavy Metal Hunter EP (including a Sabbat cover track), both last ones appeared on a compilation before (the latter being released more than a decade ago). This band’s Thrash / Heavy Metal is at least as energetic as their companions on this split, yet not as ‘evil’. But that does not matter. This band, in case you might not know, is rather like Sabbat translated towards a NWOBHM-approach. Especially the bass lines and the twin leads remind me of the UK-scene from the Eighties (not the voices), though in a more Thrash / Speed-oriented way, I guess. It’s bizarre to listen to the Japanese lyrics (is it all about sushi, sake, geisha’s or ninja’s? – or heavy metal samurai?...), but for some reason it adds something mysterious, almost exotic. This stuff simply breathes the essence of the earliest years, and it’s like melancholy if you’re as old as I am, I guess (smiley…).
---------------------------------