I thought 'You're fuckin' shitting me?' when I
listened to the first few minutes of Swedish Antichrist's 'Forbidden World'
album.
One thing is that the beginning sounds an awful lot like the intro to Hell
Awaits, another is that what follows sounds like a mixture of
Kreator/Tankard/Destruction/Artillery/Rigor Mortis anno 1985 - with an equally
terrible production plus a vocalist who more like he's giving it all he's got
than he actually sounds good.
I was about to slate the whole thing initially, but once I'd gone through the
album a couple of times and moved into the layers of riffing, the part of me
that's still the boy who never left the period from the mid- to late eighties
began to have its say in the review process.
There are parts of this album which are so utterly genuine in their expression
that they can nothing but touch the heart of an old thrash head. There's a riff
here, a break there, then a vocal line or a particular beat which throws you
into the whirlpool of time and brings you back to a day when computers where
used merely calculating really big numbers and not for recording music.
This is in no way the greatest thrash metal album of the music history, but it
sure holds a lot of old-school quality, and for that it's worth a listen.
