Sodom - In War and Pieces
March 2 2011 at 11:19:41 PM
What are we fighting for? With the title of their thirteenth album, Sodom joins The Simpsons (Treehouse Of Horror Episode 21) and Looney Tunes (1964, Wile E. Coyote) in changing the spelling of
Peace to
Piece for comedic effect.
War And Pieces. Its a knee slapper. Also a good name for a board game retailer. At this point in human history, the Simpson's episode is likely the closest most of us will ever get to a deep familiarity with Tolstoy, so the band is wise to count on only the book's reputation as "a lengthy fucker" to have filtered down to regular Joes for use as a touchstone of common experience. Sodom's effort is not overlong in album terms, but when played out in your own personal mesh of spacetime, an eternity is revealed: one moment stretched out over years, its substance thinning as it reaches into the cold black void. You will remove the headphones to find that your wife is the same age as when the album started, while you look and feel ten years older. Its the monotone shouting that does most of the damage. And I can usually tune out that kind of thing coming from the wife. (Audience Laughs). Here it sends me under the porch. I lay there some nights wondering if this isn't Tom Araya's secret side project, with the lunkhead holler that has been slowly edging up to walk point on Slayer's forced hump to an overdue grave now spilling over into his other endeavors. If true, this is his deadliest work since he first impersonated Sodom's frontman on the 2006 "comeback" album. The beer-breathed old man's futbol chant cum NY hardcore vocal cadence seems to attain its fullest psywar effectiveness when combined with late Sodom's boom-bap marching music, an increasingly groove-oriented rack o' riffs suspended in pristine computer cleansed animation. A mediocre model of thrash for our times? Nothing special, but good enough for a Sodom record? Don't ask me I don't give a damn.
[
Marcus Garvey]
1.jpg "Label Profile: The Ajna Offensive")
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he went so far as to call himself "Ian Pieces"
- Willie the Groundskeeper