Review Summary: A rocky but also solid start for one of Germany’s leading thrash metal band.
In the 1980’s thrash metal was easily one of the most important and influential subgenre in heavy metal music, appearing in nearly every country you can imagine. So it’s no surprise that being the leading metal music country in Europe next to the UK, Germany also had its own scene in thrash metal, known as Teutonic thrash metal. In just a couple of years this scene spawned multiple bands, many of them being as musically strong and characteristic as anything the Bay Area or other countries had to offer. While the Teutonic thrash scene has its leading bands (Kreator, Sodom, Destruction), there is also another band, that might be lesser-known to the public, but their influence and discography is not something that one can easily ignore. That band is Holy Moses.
Formed in Aachen on 1980, Holy Moses is actually one of the very first incarnation of the thrash metal genre in Germany, and despite of numerous line-up changes as well as geographical and musical isolation they managed to make a name for themselves in the underground metal community with a string of demo tapes. The band made their full-length debut in 1986 with “Queen of Siam”, an album which already showcased many of the band’s strengths, but just like many other of their contemporaries, it’s also a sign for better things to come.
The musical approach Holy Moses displays on this album contains pretty much everything why Teutonic thrash bands managed to make a name for themselves. Like the early records made by Destruction or Sodom, their music roots in the pre-existing tropes of NWOBHM and speed metal, but due to the influence of first-wave black metal bands like Venom, Hellhammer and Bathory the approach is different. The riffing, the sound, the tone are all darker, faster and heavier, and the vocals are also more guttural and rougher as well. The album’s opener “Necropolis” is a good display of this, which after a 30 second buildup transforms into a full blown thrasher with a marching song style main riff and tight performance by other band members as well.
However Necropolis’s nature and the upcoming songs that proceed it quickly highlight the major issue that plagues “Queen of Siam” and that’s the band’s surprisingly restrained approach to their songwriting, especially compared to other German thrash bands of that time. While a band like Kreator fully embraced the viciousness and intensity in their music on “Pleasure to Kill”, Holy Moses prefers less technical and more basic mid-tempo thrash riffing on this album. Unfortunately most of them don’t have a memorable, good hook and they threaten to send the songs into a bore. The biggest example of this is “Don't Mess around with the Bitch” which feels very sloppy, devoid of energy and longer that five and a half minutes.
So it’s no surprise that the album really improves where Holy Moses picks up the pace with songs like “Roadcrew” or “Walpurgisnight”. Other highlights include the Iron Maiden like glopping of the title track and the instrumental “Torches of Fire” and the rest of tracks also have their momentum. The band’s performance is also solid. Guitarist Andy Classen while being far from the skilled riffmaster he would become on later albums does a solid job here, and actually performing better the lead guitar department than the rhythm. The bass, the drumwork and the production is decent as well, but there is somebody else who kicks up the album’s worth a lot more and outshines some of the musical faults. Her name is Sabrina Classen.
At a time when women were unusual in metal let alone this territory, Sabrina took the position of being the vocalist and quickly became Holy Moses’s secret weapon. Her growling, screeching voice oozing from sheer venom might be off-putting at first but in time I found it not only fitting to the band’s music, but it was also what gave a sinister edge and some characteristic to what is otherwise a pretty run-of-the-mill proto-black/thrash metal record.
In conclusion “Queen of Siam” might not hold a candle to the band’s later efforts or the other significantly better and important thrash records of its time, but it is still an enjoyable record on its own limited merits and ambitions as well a decent encapsulation of the musical pillars that this band and German thrash managed to form itself upon.
