Subtlety, hidden meanings, ballads: Yeah that’s the red squishy mess left behind when Sturmtiger roll over those concepts. Look: They are called Sturmtiger, they have a member of Necrosadistic Goat Torture in their ranks, have a b&w picture of a sinking battleship on the cover and the ep is called Atomic Hammer ferfucksake…! This is heavily downtuned, fire-and-smoke-of-war blackened brutal death metal. The bass sounds like an anvil, the drums sound like a death knell, the guitars race across this soundscape like barbed wire in no man’s land and the deep vocals echo and belch mustard gas.

This appears to be an amalgamation of their last two demos as the last song, the superb ‘Trench Warfare’, has a  somewhat different production sound that is almost Ildjarn influenced death metal with a gloriously loose distorted bass and drums like the beating wings of some behemoth.

So what you get for your gun are four tracks: Invasion, Atomic Hammer, Sacrifice and the aforementioned Trench Warfare. All are brutal as hell, relentless outbreaks of battle that hammer their way through your skull with the force of the title track made real. It is all full tilt and just kind of blitzkriegs you, leaving you breathless but fully engaged such is the quality of the material. The riffs grab you, the vocals bark violence, the rhythm keeps it on bloodsoaked rails and the songs hook and hold without a trace of concession to melodic surrender.

Thick, oily, iron clad death metal that bludgeons and crushes every  muscle and bone in its path and has not a single dull moment in its thirteen and a half minute assault. The most wonderfully destructive nailbomb of hybrid death metal I’ve heard since Winds Of Genocide. Head for the bunkers…

(8.5/10 Gizmo)

http://www.myspace.com/sturmtigerofficial