I don’t know if you’ve tried something like this: You find a CD or a comic book or whatever in a shop and you go: ‘Hey, nice, I haven’t got that one in my collection!’ and you pick it up as the most natural course of action.

And then you come home and realise that the CD or whatever is already right there on the shelf.

This happened to me the other day.

A list of new CD’s was sent out among the webzine staff and Master’s ‘Collection of Souls’ was on it. I thought: ‘Cool, I don’t know that one, but I liked ‘On the Seventh Day God Created…Master’ (1990) – so let me have it.’

When I received it in the post, I went down in the basement where I keep my CD’s and comic books to dig out ‘On the Seventh Day…’, you know, just to get updated on the old stuff. And what did I find right there in the racks? That’s right: ‘Collection of Souls’.

How could I forget? Well, it turns out that must be a case of repressed memories. I simply did not want to keep the memory of a poor release.

Paul Speckmann is a legend in his own right, but even legends make mistakes and hit low-points. ‘Collection of Souls’ certainly is one. I can see myself having bought this CD second hand at some point, listening to half of it and hauling it into the halls of oblivion.

The reasons for rereleasing this album have to be business-related rather than artistic, because it is no work of art. It is a collection of at best mediocre punk-death-thrash metal with a (still) lousy sound. I can’t pin-point any highlights whatsoever.

When young bands start out playing live, they usually throw in a cover to get at least some reaction from the audience. Master has done the same here with Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak. Even that trick fails.

In conclusion; this is a rerelease of a release that shouldn’t have hit the streets in the first place.