F.K.Ü. (that’s Freddy Kruger’s Ünderwear to the uninitiated!) return once more for their fourth album of crazy, horror inspired fun thrash metal (let’s face it – their lyrics were never going to be pondering deep meaningful issues or attempting to right the wrongs of the world with a name like that, were they?). For those who aren’t aware of the band, they formed in the late 80s in Sweden, but didn’t release anything of note and quickly disappeared. However, years later (1997, to be precise), they decided to reform and managed to pull a demo and their full length album out in quick succession. A few years passed before their 2nd album appeared, but since then they seem to have hit a good vein of productivity, leading us to 2013, and their latest effort of quick, zombie loving, cannibalistic monster-thrash.
There’s a lot to like here, but nothing which you haven’t heard before if you’re even slightly interested in crossover thrash (or even regular thrash for that matter). There’s plenty of touches of early Exodus, Municipal Waste, touches of S.O.D, all wrapped in a pristine production and topped off with lashings of craziness and entertainment in the lyrical themes. The album starts off with a public service announcement for what sounds like a classic horror-filled dystopian future, with news reports announcing attack, riots and virus outbreaks – all backed with a slightly limp cinematic-styled orchestral piece, before “Rise of the Mosh Mongers” begins with the typically crunchy thrash tone, chugging guitars, clattering drums and vocals that recall a mixture of both early Steve ‘Zetro’ Souza and early Chuck Billy with classic metal histrionics as an added bonus. The songs cover just about every horror inspired theme you can think of (even the band themselves resemble zombie extras from the Walking Dead in their promo pics, just in case you didn’t get the idea of what they were about from their music alone!).
Amongst the 17 quick bursts of thrash you will even find ‘sequels’ of “The Uberslasher”, cut into parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 dotted throughout the runtime. These are the shortest songs on the album and don’t really add a lot to the album for me (mostly less than 30 seconds each). I feel maybe if they’d have stuck them all together or at least had some sort of reprise linking the musical theme that I’d have got more out of them, but as they are they merely seem like a couple of cobbled together riffs that they didn’t want to waste. “Marz Attacks” is my particular favourite track, and I must admit I did laugh out loud at the bellowed lyric of “MOSH PART!!” before the breakdown – it caught me off guard and hit the right funny bone!
All in all, I can’t fault the album too much. It never really sags or bores, but at the same time it doesn’t particularly inspire or thrill to any huge degree. I actually really like vocalist Larry Lethal, as he stands apart from a lot of vocalists in bands doing this style of thrash, not content with just bellowing constantly, the guy actually has range and can properly hit some impressive notes. I’d say that this is worth a punt if you have some spare cash and must devour absolutely everything thrash metal related, but just don’t expect to have your world turned upside down by it. This is metal thrashing madness, nothing more nothing less – a nice reliable thrash thirst quencher.
(6.5/10 Lars Christiansen)
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