Bolt Thrower In Battle There is now law is the first effort from the legendary British Death Metal group. This one show cases a lot of their roots and its cool to see their punk and thrash metal roots coming out in this one. The recording is a lot rougher than their subsequent efforts but hey, we all gotta start somewhere.
The album starts out with a dark brooding intro with heaps of feedback. As soon as the first riff sets in you can hear the drummer is already well developed as a player. Those double kicks <3 !!! The opening riff in question is an early version of the Bolt Thrower signature riff. It's simply glorious. The songs follow in a death metal / crust punk vein, I feel like I can hear a little Slayer influence in there too. I know at least a couple of the members were right into the punk scene and you can definitely hear that influence come through in the playing.
This is an underdeveloped version of Bolt Thrower. It has a much “bouncier” feel, for lack of a better word. In future years you can hear the guitars get a lot deeper and more “Palm Muted (guitar playing technique)” which really shaped their sound in future years. This is a band that is already coherent, they were still yet to find their neiche in metal but for what it is its not a bad listen. In fact its pretty good! It’s different enough to stand out a little from the English grind scene and is already more developed than others of their scene (early Carcass is a prime example) were at the time. The album doesn’t really stand out in any major way from the hordes of death metal bands that were doing similar stuff at the time, but you can hear the band definitely have something different which is only just starting to shine through now. Hard to pick a fave track off this one but have a listen to “Concession of Pain” it reminds me a lot of the later song “Cenotaph” from the War Master release. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the song is a bit of a re-working of this.
Above criticisms aside this is not a bad album. It just doesn’t really shine through in the way the next few Bolt Thrower albums did. The band were already writing decent songs and the album is quite enjoyable. I look at it as more of an indication of the mighty institution that Bolt Thrower were to become in the following years.
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