Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Death By Enforcer

I started listening to Heavy Metal around '82, with AC/DC's For Those About To Rock being my first serious vinyl purchase. From there, things got heavier with Judas Priest's Screaming For Vengeance and Iron Maiden's Piece Of Mind, and Metal music became my life through High School...in fact, my senior quote in our school's yearbook reads "If you're not a metalhead, you might as well be dead". I was rocking Slayer, Megadeth, and Metallica t-shirts every day, and covering my books with band logos and angry Metal lyrics. I lived and breathed this music.

By the time the 90's came around, I was discovering bands like Judge and Insted, and I pretty much kicked Metal to the curb for the entire 90's decade. Around 2005, I decided to clean out my CD collection and toss out some of the crap that I'd managed to collect over the years. To help separate the trash from treasures, I came up with the "brilliant" idea to listen to every CD that I had in my collection. Given that I had a couple thousand of them, it was quite the undertaking, and it took me a couple of years to complete the project. During that time, and dusting off those old Metal CDs, I fell in love with that music from my youth all over again. From there I was inspired to dig into what the Metal scene was up to. Here we are in 2013...30 years after Metal music first took over my life...and while many people thought that this was just a fad, and something that I'd grow out of, I still get a bit of an adrenaline rush when I discover a great new Metal band. Long Live Heavy Metal.

Enforcer are from Sweden, but their new album, Death By Fire, sounds like it could have come out of Los Angeles back in 1985, and you would have found it in the vinyl bin alongside bands like Malice, Laaz Rockit and Lizzy Borden. Goddamn, I love this music.

I'm giving serious thought to placing this album at the number one spot on my Best of 2013 list. This album is a blast to listen to, and makes me want to dig out the denim and create a battle vest like Doug.

Sure, I had less expensive options on buying this album, and could have picked up the black vinyl from a US distro, but I felt that this album was worth the extra effort. Overseas shipping be damned...I ordered the limited version from Nuclear Blast Germany.

Hand numbered and limited to 150 on blue vinyl.

No comments: