This is barely the second record that I’m hearing from Norway’s Audiopain, the other one was the Revel In Desecration demo CD from 2002 that I had the chance to acquire almost 2 years ago (thanks, Siri!).

What I first noticed about The Traumatizer, as juxtaposing it to Revel In Desecration was that, although the guys have once again shown quite unambiguously that they are firmly not going to quit playing their eighties inspired thrash metal stuff, these new 6 tracks seem to sound kind of… more mature yet more pliant and complex in construction. And that was something that I personally liked – I highly respect and admire acts that insist on staying true to themselves when it comes to making music, but if creative growth is missing totally, then one not that flattering word will unavoidably find its way to the spotlights, and this word is called “obsolete”… Thankfully, Audiopain are way too far from becoming obsolete and I believe these dudes have a lot more to offer!

And the packaging of The Traumatizer (Kim Solve / Audiopain) is simply priceless in its puzzling complexity! Once more I can’t help laughing at what the band’s bassist Petter mentioned about the CD booklet in an interview for a webzine run by a friend of mine: “You should really try to do a few hundred of them, Brad!”… Many thanks to Audiopain’s fronter Sverre Daehli for sending me a copy of The Traumatizer!