Review Summary: Tapping The Vein became more like a death-metal album, Sodom still manages to display raw thrash-metal. Definitely Sodom's heaviest and fastest album.
Fuelled with influences from black-metal, thrash-metal, speed-metal and combined with inspirations from bands like
Venom and
Hellhammer,
Sodom became one of the most heaviest and cruel thrash-metal bands in Germany and perhaps in the whole world in my opinion. While
Kreator got most of the attention (because of their influencing extreme thrash music) both
Sodom and
Destruction were left behind more or less.
Destruction is claimed, however, to be the best of the bunch but
Sodom especially was left out. All of these bands released several albums that became more or less classics within their home country, which are
Pleasure To Kill,
Persecution Mania and
Release From Agony are some albums that are considered to be some of the bands best albums, but I think it is wrong to focus on just one or two specific albums from a band, since then people only gets interested by just those or that album and they basically don't care about the rest of the other albums.
Sodom perhaps didn't had the ability to create technical and complex music which made many albums sound similar to each other but they had the ability to sound sinister and heavy, and none of
Destruction or
Kreator couldn't beat
Sodom's heavy guitar tunes and
Angelripper's harsh half-death sounding vocals. Sometimes I think that
Sodom was one of the better bands but then I start to compare the other bands, it all ends up with that one band is better than the other and so on, but I will never let go of the fact that
Sodom is the most bone-crushing band of these three German thrash pioneers.
Persecution Mania and
Agent Orange are two albums that are often mentioned in the terms of
Sodom, but I have recently discovered
M-16 and
Masquerade In Blood and realized that those two albums are at least just as good as the other albums. But then I looked around and found this album called
Tapping The Vein which was released in 1992 and realized that this must be the heaviest album
Sodom ever made.
Tapping The Vein shows even stronger displays of thrash being converted into death-metal but it still sounds more like pure breeded thrash.
Sodom is probably the only band from the trio who uses lots of war themes in their music, such as the songs
Back To War and
Hunting Season. Though it isn't only war all the time, as you can also notice that there are also some gore and pretty much violence in their material too, such
The Crippler and
Skinned Alive has some gory lyrics.
Tom Angelripper's vocals are some of his best in my opinion, because here he uses growls instead of his raspy/harsh vocal style and does a great performance with the vocals. They suit very well to the fast and raw music; these vocals would definitely suit great if this album was a straight ahead death-metal album. Try and imagine an air-raid: the warning sirens starts to sound, and death is about to fall down from a smoke coloured sky,
Tom's bass would be a bit similar to a bomber plane in my opinion. It maybe isn't the highlight instrument in this album but it delivers a heavy punch and it adds a thick and dense sound alongside guitars. I can only hear rhythms hear but the thick sound from the bass is enough, a bomber plane’s mission is to perform an ‘’easy’’ task, drop the bombs and return home. That’s exactly what
Tom is doing, he creates destruction with his bass, just as a bomber would do.
Imagine that you just got the orders of preventing the allied forces to take over the beach, and you grab your fully loaded MG42 machine gun. You wait until the infantry will poor out from the troop carriers. You squeeze the trigger for mother and country and unleash a storm of lead that shreds and tears through the troops who then fall shattered down to the ground. That's how I would describe
Andy Brings's guitar work, as it is some of the fastest guitar work I have heard from this band and
only from this band. Sometimes you can clearly hear that there is death-metal influenced riffing in the guitar work, then later you hear that there is maniac thrash riffing on top of that, and here you have a powerful and highly shredding guitar with both catchy riffs and less catchy riffs. Besides that, the guitars in overall are incredible fast and heavy. Songs like
One Step Over The Line,
Wachturm/Erwachet and
Reincarnation would be more like a small rifle battle because these songs are some of the slowest but they are yet very heavy and brutal Visualize rain drops falling heavily to the ground, as a hunter is hiding in a deserted building waiting for prey. Suddenly the sniper scope sees a slow moving group of soldiers among the ruins; time to hunt! One by one the soldiers are pinned down by the enemy sniper who easily blows out the poor men's lifes like a candle in a wind. The guitar solos are just as precise as a sniper's scope, one bullet, one chance; the solos are skilled and played with great precision which creates fast, chaotic and entertaining solos.
You suddenly find yourself in side a battered and torn city...and it's deadly quite. You know that you have to find shelter and wait for your comrades to help you out from enemy lines. You notice that the ground shakes, rumble starts to fall from the half-destroyed buildings, and the adrenaline really starts to flow when you suddenly see a squadron of German Tiger tanks heading towards you. The shells start to rain down all over you in rapid speed until there is no more cover left to hide behind. You need to run; run the fastest you can if you don't wan’t to get hit. That's how
Witchhunter's drums would sound like, since there are lots of double kick drumming and other fast and heavy drum sections in this album. Even if almost every drum pattern goes in high-speed it is still very enjoyable and entertaining (at least for me).
This is without a doubt
Sodom's fastest and heaviest album, and now I take back my words when I said that
Persecution Mania was balancing between thrash and death-metal, because but
Tapping The Vein did it with a bigger and wider view, soundwise. Take
Persecution Mania,
Masquerade In Blood and
M-16 and forge them together and you will have a small hinge of what
Tapping The Vein will sound like. An excellent album but it does not make it to the top, as there were some smaller things that I didn't liked but they were few. One thing I didn't liked so much was just some of the riffs in a few songs, actually the whole guitar work, felt a little bit... not totally one-dimensional but some riffs just sounded so re-hashed or used, the thing that saves the guitar work is the tremendous speed. There are lots of riffs that I like because of their heaviness and catchiness but sometimes it sounds uninspired. Other than that, an almost flawless album, very heavy, very brutal and very fast, just the way I like it. This is an album that really needs more attention, and
Sodom fans and thrash-metal fanatics would definitely enjoy this album because of it's massive energy... maybe not a good album to start with though. It could be too much to handle to inexperienced listeners, but on the other hand, people who like extreme and heavy music (such as death-metal) could give this album a chance.
Pros
+ Definitely Sodom's fastest album
+ The overall sound is massive and rock solid
+ Tom's growls suits perfect to the fast and raw music
+ Perhaps not a technical or complex album but it still is very catchy and enjoyable
Cons
- Sometimes the songs sound a bit similar to each other
- Nothing wrong with the guitar work but the riffs sometimes sounds quite standard and uninspired
Recommended Tracks
-- One Step Over The Line
-- Hunting Season
-- Wachturm/Erwachet
-- Back To War
This album will hang on for a while before you get tired of it; it is heavy, fast and brutal. An excellent album, final rating will be a: 4/5
