Band: Vulcano / Nifelheim
Title: Thunder Metal
Label: I Hate Records
Distribution: Bertus
Release date: 23/05/2008
Review: split-MCD

This is a very interesting split-mini-album, because the two bands featured here aren’t the sweetest, nor are they the youngest. Thunder Metal opens with two songs by the Brazilian horde Vulcano, which might be one of the oldest extreme Metal bands ever in South America. This band started in 1981 (!) and was very active during the eighties. After a decade-long break, the band reformed about five years ago, and for this release, Zhema (g), F. Nonath (g), Carlos Diaz (b), Angel (v) and V.X (d) recorded two exclusive tracks, “The Evil Always Return” and “Suffered Souls”. And in fact nothing has changed since their first sight. Still the band creates thrashy and diabolical old school-inspired Black Metal in the vein of Hellhammer / Celtic Frost, Venom, Slayer or early Possessed. The whole sounds as it were written and recorded twenty years ago, but this ‘dated’ element cannot bother the adepts. Don’t expect experimental breaks or technical riffs, because this isn’t but the purest ‘core’ of what extreme Metal must sound like.

The Swedish spikes-and-leather-demons from Nifelheim do almost exist for two decades. Throughout the years, they evolved into one of the most important bands in the beer-and-bikes-oriented Thrash / Black-scene. “Raging Flames” is an old version of the same song that features on the band’s latest full length, Envoy Of Lucifer (Regain Records, 2007), which strongly reminds me to early Kreator (what can’t be else but grandiose, of course!), while “Sepulchral Fornication” and “Insulter Of Jesus Christ” are created for this split-release exclusively, the latter featuring Jon Nödtveidt (Dissection, The Black, Ophthalamia, De Infernali, Terror etc). The two new songs are in the very same vein of almost all former material, with a strong reference to the first Bathory-records (like the opening riffs in “Sepulchral…”), Sathanas, old Possessed, Aura Noir, Bewitched or Destruction, to name a few. This is Rock’n’Roll for the Dark Minds among us.

93/100

Ivan Tibos.