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Sodom: Get what you deserve
12/07/11 || Habakuk
Sodom. Yeah, classic band. “Agent Orange”. “Persecution Mania”. Whatever. Germany. Comeback successful, sort of. “Code Red”. “M-16”. Bla. That’s probably what your talk to any generic Sodom patch carrier will sound like. Not that I’m carrying one myself, but I admit, I too have debated some obvious choices from their back catalogue at length. For this very site even. However, we would not be Global Domination if we stopped here. Why, of course not! So, let’s talk about a bit of black spot in Sodom’s back catalogue, eh?
If you ask me, that black spot actually starts somewhere around “Tapping the vein” (Why isn’t this more talked about?) and ends somewhere around “Code Red”. That makes about seven years of blank stares, although the band was active and released three full-length albums in the meantime, the first of which was “Get what you deserve” with a big slab of 16 songs thrown at the unsuspecting listener. And that listener, case in point me, would soon find out that most of them barely hit the three minute mark. The obvious question is: Did Sodom turn punk suddenly? The obvious answer is: yes. Kind of. And while they had of course touched the subject before (“Wachturm”, “Ausgebombt”, “Bullet in the head”), they had never gone full-frontal – It mostly came across as a nod to their inspirations rather than a real musical direction. Enter “Get what you deserve”. Exit subtlety.
Celebrating their three-piece line up, Sodom embraced simplicity, snottiness, “sexually provocative” lyrics (in German…), rumbling, loud bass guitar and d-beat fueled speed. With that came an absolutely atypical, but actually quite fitting production job with thin guitars, hollow drums and an overall in-your-face-ness. In the end, it won’t require Professor Thrash to find out why they covered Venom on here – but we all know, when Sodom cover something, they do it right. So, here’s a little bonus in the song department already, and it stands next to punk/metal hybrid beasts like “Sodomized”, “Gomorrah”, “Unbury the hatchet”, the title track or the hilariously titled, killer-riff driven “Jabba the Hut”.
Sounds pretty good so far, doesn’t it? Well, it is. So why isn’t the album a famous milestone? Simple logic: Because the rest of the songs hasn’t been named yet, and for good reason. Some more, some less, but in general, they are nothing but uninspired, monotonous high speed tunes that exist for the sake of keeping shit simple. To give you an idea: I really enjoy some of the stuff Atomic Steif does on drums, but when he plays the same thrash beat throughout basically an entire song, it’s pushing things a bit.
They are not horrible, but three to four tunes could probably be trimmed off the album without any loss, including the totally out of place yawnfest instrumental “A tribute to Moby Dick” (err, what?) that basically consists of open root notes. That’s. It. But apart from those four, the big lot of the less-than-fantastic song brigade just suffer from the monotony that sets in after a while.
Sodom tried hard to put their Motörhead side forward here, but stayed too metal in the process, basically writing “simple metal with d-beats”. Sounds good on paper, I know, and it had worked for them in several instances before. It actually does on “Get what you deserve”, too, when the band either include awesome riff/rhythm combinations or go out rockin’ – but the painfully obvious truth is, mostly they don’t. They just couldn’t do it well enough to fill a 40-minute album. And that is why a few select tracks off here still sound awesome live, but the rest is buried and forgotten.
Bottom line: Get this if you’re a completist, or just go out and listen to “Tapping the vein” some more.
- Information
- Released: 1994
- Label: Steamhammer
- Website: www.sodomized.info
- Band
- Tom Angelripper: vocals, bass
- Andy Brings: guitars
- Atomic Steif: drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Get what you deserve
- 02. Jabba the Hut
- 03. Jesus Screamer
- 04. Delight in slaying
- 05. Die stumme Ursel
- 06. Freaks of nature
- 07. Eat me!
- 08. Unbury the hatchet
- 09. Into perdition
- 10. Sodomized
- 11. Fellows in misery
- 12. A tribute to Moby Dick
- 13. Silence is consent
- 14. Erwachet!
- 15. Gomorrah
- 16. Angel Dust (Venom)
