Kreator
Renewal

THE REVIEW

1992: winds of change are blowing in the Kreator house.

The eighties thrash, the hard and pure one, to be clear, seems to have a hard life in the nineties: the "Black Album" legitimizes "heavy" metal and makes it accessible to new segments of paying audiences; the groove of the Darrell brothers gains followers in an increasingly Pantera-influenced world, ready to embrace Nu sounds. An additional opportunity to ride their sonic intransigence, right? Not at all!: overtaken in violence and speed by death metal and the emerging black metal, eighties thrash suddenly awakens in a steel lung.

The first to realize this were indeed the German Kreator, who, after the sublime sonic scavenges produced in the previous decade, decided to shake off an attitude that had become decidedly obsolete.

But the change perpetrated by Kreator is not an opportunistic adjustment to the changing tastes of an ever more demanding audience: it is the slow yet evident maturation of their leader, who, album after album, achieves the feat of transforming the original bone-crushing thrash into something intimate, personal, with existential nuances, as we have rarely seen in extreme music (the Death of the never-too-mourned Chuck Schuldiner come to mind). Mille Petrozza thus sheds the worn out garb of the relentless thrasher and with a certain courage shows us his more "sensitive" soul; his music, always interested in social and sometimes political themes, itself becomes a reflection on society, a raw metaphor of reality.

It's a pity no one understood it: a very controversial chapter in the discography of the Teutonic band, "Renewal" has the audacity to introduce timid experiments that will earn Mille Petrozza the title of "merdallaro" of the year, a status he'll hardly be able to shake off in the following years (embarrassing, after the commercial flop, is the abrupt reversal with the anonymous and cold "Cause for Conflict", a tribute to the sonic violence of their beginnings). Permeated by apocalyptic visions and torn by industrial incursions, "Renewal" is actually a fresh, ingenious album from the cover onwards: definitely one of the darkest ever produced by the Teutonic band. An album that, nevertheless, manages to combine the violence of the past with the dark suggestions that will be embraced in the future (and that will explode definitively in works like "Outcast" and "Endorama").

Yes, because to understand that Petrozza & co. haven’t softened at all, just press play and get overwhelmed by the superb opener "Winter Martyrium", which starts off rhythmically (great performance by "Ventor" Reil on drums), only to explode into a compelling race against the wind, where Mille seems to reach for all the air his lungs can provide. And is the title track any less? A powerful mid-tempo (which still proudly features in the live setlist today), "Renewal" is the artist's desperate cry, the apotheosis of the tragic current that runs through the entire album. An album in which rage, frustration, and utopia constantly meet and clash.

"Brainseed" and "Zero to None" (respectively fourth and seventh tracks) will certainly not go down in the history of extreme music, but bolstered by an unprecedented hardcore fury (the tearing screams driving them are intense) and darkened by icy industrial counterpoints, they prove to be genuine blows to the teeth. Tracks that, when examined closely, make the songs of the much more acclaimed and canonical "Coma of Souls" pale in comparison (an album that in my opinion has aged poorly, lacking bite and conviction: a weak continuation of the "extreme aggressions" of the past).

So, what made you so angry? What outraged you so much? The minute and a half of samples in the instrumental "Realitaskontrolle"? The labyrinthine melodic evolutions of a song like "Reflection"?

In reality, atmosphere and melody serve Petrozza's design, who, with an unusual penetration into the metal universe, manages to insinuate himself into the fractures of a world that is changing and heading towards a fairly uncertain future. In 1989, the Berlin Wall had in fact fallen (and I do not exclude, a completely personal opinion, a play on words between "wall" and "renewal"): the frigid winds of the Cold War seem to have finally dissipated, but what future awaits this new and "free" Europe? To a codified world, in fatal balance, where the players and the rules of the game emerge clearly, a nebulous mirage appears, behind which new haunting scenarios lurk, where flesh-and-blood totalitarianisms can be replaced by new invisible, and therefore much more fearsome, totalitarianisms.

Hence the sense of bewilderment, the fear in the face of the ghost of mind manipulation, of consciousness control, themes on which the entire work hinges ("Brain Seeds" a title above all), a mirror of a German where confusion, euphoria, and fear merge. Visions that emerge vividly in the violent "Europe After the Rain" (perhaps the album's best moment), sensations that can be palpable in the desolate sonic spiral of "Karmic Wheel", a kind of apocalyptic "ballad" where the most bitter and reflective Kreator emerge: spine-tingling is the atmospheric interlude, where a slow crescendo of bass, barely-there guitars, and chilling samples culminates in an elegant end-of-the-world solo. Listening to this piece, spitting on "Renewal" means spitting on Isis, on Opeth, on all those who have wisely built their careers on the alternation of violence, melody, and elegant progressive counterpoints.

The concluding "Depression Unrest" closes these tragic reflections by depicting a Europe, perhaps a World, adrift: the refrain, which oozes a despair fused with an unprecedented fragility for the band, represents one of the album's most significant moments, which fades out in desolation. In Mille's cry, however, there's that tremor, that passion, that desire not to give in despite the fear, despite the overwhelming forces to conquer. Resist resist resist: it is the voice of a generation that sets out, lost, in an icy, dehumanized, insane world, pregnant with pitfalls, hypocrisy, and lies.

Not all tracks are excellent, this should be said: the experiment does not always succeed and there are quite a few awkward ingenuities of a former-brutal grappling with his first "singer-songwriter" work. In terms of production, finally, there was room for improvement, much improvement (generally the solos were penalized, while the dry sound of the drums does not sit well with the dark languor of the guitars): with more powerful and clear sounds perhaps we would have had a completely different work in our hands.

However, "Renewal" is certainly not an album to be discarded, precisely because it represents the creative impetus of an artist who, despite having made the history of extreme music (and thus being able to enjoy a comfortable snooze on his laurels), decides at a certain point to break the restrictions of a music that evidently no longer belongs to him and reveal himself in his most shocking nakedness. Praise to Mille Petrozza, for his courage and for the always diverse emotions he has been able to give us over the years.