Band: Nailgun Massacre
Title: Backyard Butchery
Label: Slowrunner Records
Distribution: Slowrunner Records
Review: CD

Nailgun Massacre are a rather young but extremely experienced Dutch quintet (a quartet on this album, by the way), debuting with Backyard Butchery. Based on the cover drawing, the band’s moniker and the song titles, and keeping in mind that nobody else but Paul Speckmann (think: Krabathor, Abomination, Master, War Cry, Martyr, Deathstrike and many others) appears as guest vocalist on several tracks, one might know what to expect: blood and honour…, excuse me, Blood and Horror!
The lyrics, written and sung by Corpsechucker, deal with gore and splatter subjects: torture, rape, porn, cannibalism, zombies; nightmarish stuff in all its ugly aspects indeed. The approach is very eighties and it makes all songs sound like a part of some (seventies) Horror movie’s soundtrack.
Musically (I guess I have to call it this way, ‘musically’; instruments and vocals usually are meant to create ‘songs’ so I cannot define it but as ‘Music’, you see), Nailgun Massacre bring the only correctly related adaptation, dwelling in spheres from the eighties and very early nineties. Opening track Cadaverous Lay starts, for example, with a very down-tuned, low-tempo yet extremely heavy riff, slowly turning into uncompromising, merciless and straight-forward Old School Death Melancholy. The melodies remind me especially to the (supremacy of the early) American scene, and so is the inherent and manifest brutality of the song structures. Filthy and raw, this is what caused one of the biggest musical explo(ra)tions more than twenty years ago. Autopsy, Necrophagia, Goatlord, Mantas / Death, Cianide, Massacre - it’s a beauty from the past translated into the present yet without losing the original intentions to shock the narrow-minded world. Major difference: a massive sound (Sawsound Studios, Leiden, Holland), but including the morbidity of this band’s American forefathers. Yet not only the American scene comes to mind - what about the Swedish one, for example (think: Grave / Morbid, even very early Unleashed) or, of course, the Dutch scene, with bands like Hail Of Bullets, Pestilence (Consuming Impulse-era, evidently) or Mourning as possible references.
The album’s speed varies from pretty slow to up-tempo, including a handful of sledge-hammering accelerations yet totally lacking of any high-speed outburst - and that’s a statement for sure. But it does not repel any form of fire-breathing brutality at all.
On top of all these sweet words by undersigned, I feel the need to add another promotional positivity: Nailgun Massacre do all this with a very personal touch of highly-inspired own-identityship (I like to play with words this way, ugh!). Each single composition sort of comes with a unique touch, putting Nailgun Massacre’s personal stamp on, in spite of the West-European and, especially, USA-based influences.

Nice detail to end with, and in some way inspiring as well (please use your imagination and execute your misanthropic and / or masochistic thoughts!): the full length comes with a 10cm (+/- 4-inch)-long nail included. Useful material to start with…

90/100

Ivan Tibos.