BURN! WAR! CONQUER! HELL! FIRE! Ravaging through the enemy masses you feel only hate. You tear their soft flesh and unleash bloody fountains and streams of organ-gore. Hacking and biting, fearless, not taking any notice of several mortal wounds you yourself have endured, you march on in furious ecstasy. This dreadnought of war, death and hatred is Abominator… When I think of Australia I immediately think of rough and fast thrash metal, what is probably caused by the legacy of thrash metal maniacs Deströyer 666, Atomizer and Razor of Occam, amongst others. Though influenced by thrash, the Australian Abominator is overall strong and fast death metal. Chris Volcano, Abominators drummer and vocalist, actually played in early Deströyer 666 (only until their Violence Is The Prince Of This World EP). Two other bands he’s active with are black/thrash band Urgrund and the black/death metal band Denouncement Pyre. The other band members include Andrew Undertaker, handling guitar, bass-parts and vocals and Valak Exhumer playing the bass. Abominator was founded by Chris and Andrew in 1994 to create the most brutal black/death/war metal possible… well, on this fourth album it still is brutal death metal without compromises. This is mainly the result of lightning fast songs and a low, grinding guitar sound. With only few exceptions, being a little less fast mid-tempo parts, the music blasts on at ultra fast pace.

The use of two vocalists makes the music somewhat interesting… a lower grunt exchanges with a little higher grunt/scream, coming together once in a while to enlarge the devastating effect. Not too often (for sure, far too little) great fast guitar solos take over. A negative point are the soft drums, which are at times barely audible. Though this accentuates guitars and vocals, the music would be even more destroying with a better drum mixing. Having arrived at the negative downside anyways, all that can be mentioned furthermore is the boring repetition of the songs. Though sounding great at first, after eight songs I’m totally fed up with it. For better future releases: better audible drums, larger diversity of song-structure and perhaps more guitar solos needed! It would be interesting to see these maniacs play live though; they sure unleash some kind of hell! Perhaps they should start with a gig in the Netherlands with a headlining Deströyer 666? The cover art of this CD is – by the way – painted by Chris Moyen, who did massive amounts of great logos and paintings for other (mainly black metal-) bands. Amongst these are creations for Beherit, Root, Archgoat, Black Witchery, Bestial Mockery and the French Osmose Productions logo, to name a few. Not really his greatest cover (too much colour haha), but still a nice eye-catcher.