Review Summary: A recent stand-out release from the Big Teutonic Four?
Sodom, Kreator and Destruction have all cranked out some pretty good music lately, but for some reason Tankard’s most recent, Pavlov's Dawgs, stands out to me as the best release of the four. Possibly it’s because I’ve never been a big Tankard fan and have never really gave them a chance until now. Or maybe I was just in the right mood when the album came out.
Or maybe it really is, objectively, the best recent release of the group.
ACCENT and VOCAL STYLE
Since I started criticizing music on Sputnik, I’ve come to think of metal and hardcore vocal styles – excluding actual singing – as falling somewhere on a continuous 2D triangular spectrum, like the color space artists use, with death growls (Cannibal Corpse) and screams (Slayer) and yells (Minor Threat) sitting on the corners instead of green and blue and red. Of course, that’s a pretty simplistic model of vocal types; Deathcore for example has a number of effects that wouldn’t fit into it. I learned from Sputnik Moderator Trey’s review of
Lorna Shore’s album
Pain Remains that, besides the routine growls, Deathcore is also abundant in “unintelligible grunts, gurgles, and shrieks,” and that Lorna Shore’s vocalist Will Ramos in particular covers a huge range; he’s “all over the vocal spectrum” on Pain Remains, Trey writes, moving “from soft whispers to creepy spoken word to guttural death growls and high-pitched black metal screeches.” All of which would be difficult to squeeze into the simple triangle I propose.
Andreas Geremia’s vocals DO fall onto the vocal triangle, however, sounding like a variety of...screamy-yelling, I suppose. But what struck me about his vocals is the prominent German accent. I’ve been listening to music coming out of Northern Europe for decades and never noticed such an accent, even in Nena’s 99 Red Balloons where it is definitely present if you listen for it.
It is a gross understatement to say that some people – people all over the world, perhaps especially people in power – can be irritated by accents, finding them, what, offensive? Threatening? Unpatriotic? That attitude has occasionally found its way into the universe of thrash and hardcore; consider Billy Milano’s jingoistic ranting “nice ***’n accent! Why can’t you speak like me?!”
But I love accents. There are hundreds of native-English dialects, and thousands of dialects of non-native speakers, each with their own accents, and I love them all, even the New York accent Milano no longer uses but probably grew up speaking. I have a neighbor who has family that she visits in the South-Eastern U.S., and I look forward to her returns, as she comes back speaking with an adorable southern 'twang that I could listen to all day (sigh).
Anyway, like I said, Geremia’s accent is so noticeable that it’s obvious. And that’s a curious musical phenomenon, because Schmier, Angelripper and Mille Petrozza are native Germans, but their accents are washed out when they vocalize. To take a different example from a totally different genre, the opera singer Renee Fleming sang in Elvish on The Lord of the Rings soundtracks, and has also sung in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Czech. Presumably, opera fans can’t detect an accent (not being an opera fan, I wouldn’t know).
Apparently accents are easier to disguise when singing than they are in speaking. Possibly, in the spirit of “the hell with it,” Geremia has actually EMPHASIZED it for an additional vocal effect, an effect that, like Trey’s examples above, lies outside the usual Thrash Metal vocal space. Anyway, I get a kick out it.
TONE
I read a piece once (that I’ve since failed to locate) that compared the Big Four of Thrash to the Big Teutonic Four. Therein he stated that the comparison is more of a CONTRAST, since there’s no analogues for Megadeth and Anthrax – the Teutons are more like three Slayers and a Metallica. I disagree a little with the last band (I’ve always thought Tankard sounded a little more like Anthrax than Metallica) but it was an excellent insight.
Anthrax and Tankard feel – to my hardcore-loving emotional substrate – as having a slightly lighter tone than the others, more akin to the Dead Kennedys than Slayer, especially when Araya is screaming threats of “ripping apart, severing flesh, gouging eyes, tearing limb from limb!”
No, Tankard definitely strikes me as a more social variety of thrash, and when I perused this album I thought how cool it would be to hang out with Tankard at a kegger, just stand around and talk about music and get totally ***faced. This is not to say that hanging out and getting drunk is by any means preferable to slam-dancing to Necrophobic; moshing can be as rewarding an experience as life has to offer, as long as you don't come away too battered. But it’s necessary to have SOME party music to balance the musical universe, isn’t it?
Songs from Pavlov’s Dawgs definitely fill that balancing roll.
Recommended tracks:
Diary of a Nihilist
Veins of Terra
Memento
On the Day I Die
