Have you ever been on a bar crawl in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz? Well you may have seen bearded Bavarian Blacksters V.V. and Sturmwulf propping up a table if you have. They have probably been thrown out of a few as well but the good news is that if you fancied sharing a brew with them you would be welcome as they state that they don’t “give a fuck about your NS/RA Shit. We drink with every fan of us.Fck 0ff!”. Well that’s honest I guess but does raise some pertinent questions. Their name is Finnish apparently and translates as “from the light into the shadow,” which is just perfect if you are prone to getting out of the sun and into the darkest corners of a dingy watering hole. Just in case you hadn’t got the message this duo along with their session drummer like a brew or two.
Boarisch Grattlig is the pair’s third album and starts with a zany intro of oompha beer hall sounds before opener ‘Beervaria’ swaggers into driving and determined fast black metal chops. Vocals are coarse and sound like coming from a throat in constant need of lubrication and the bounce and bracing charge of it all has a definite punky groove about it. There’s a traditional feel about the melodies here and although kept relatively simple in chord structure they sound pretty well played rather than alcoholically stumbling and lurching all over the place. The eight tracks here are fairly lengthy and the album runs over the 45-minute mark. It’s kind of like our players have embarked on an all-day session and want it to last as long as possible. The repetitive riffing snakes around the listener but whether they will want to last for the duration is something that must be taken into consideration here. You may well find it overstays its welcome like a particular hard to shrug off hangover and the constant one-dimensional vocal clamour yaps and snarls in your ears making it all the more of a challenging endurance test.
There’s very little deviation in the strumming attack but the persistence of songs like ‘Der Hammerwurf’ do, like delirium tremens, get under the skin. The guitar sound does a good job of shimmering and shivering away in constant restless torment on the title track and the more I have listened to the album the more it has quenched my thirst. Although mainly grim sounding there is a point where the melody on ‘In Dieser Welt’ suddenly gets a bit more jubilant and has an almost pop punk jauntiness about it. At one point that hardened drinkers trick of throwing up in the toilet to allow the session to continue is employed (in glorious surround sound stereo). By now the beer goggles are on and our piss stained reprobates channel up a bit of GG Allin. With ‘Die Nacht der Lust, looking for some nekromance they hit up suitable candidates akin to Fritz Honka in the Golden Slipper (yes I know that was Hamburg but allow artistic license) and now I can’t get images of Faith Akin’s revolting true crime film out my head. Ah there’s even some sampled sounds of torture and errr possibly love pumping on the album now! By the time we finally reach the end here, I’m pretty much on my last legs and even though as I write this at 9AM have the sudden urge to go down the pub! If only the local Spoons had the authenticity of a dark Bavarian brew-house…Hic!
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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