Sodom
Better Off Dead

THE REVIEW

Gelsenkirchen (Münster district), year 1990.

Only a few months have passed since, with the release of the historic "Agent Orange" ('89), Tom Angelripper and company had the satisfaction of giving many of their detractors a rough ride.

On one hand, the entry of guitarist Frank "Blackfire" Gosdzik into the lineup managed to dispel even the last compositional uncertainties that the band had been dragging since their debut EP "In The Sign Of Evil" ('84, to date among the top examples of technical incompetence, ugliness of the components, and embarrassing mediocrity of lyrics: unforgettable is the onanistic-nihilistic anthem: "I masturbate to kill my self"), on the other, "Onkel" Tom has learned to excellently take on the role of frontman, significantly maturing as a lyricist as well. In short, with the approach of the decade's end, Sodom can face the national and European metal scene with heads held high, with increased familiarity in songwriting, and, which never hurts, a good slice of audience cheering for them.

However, during the promotional tour of "Agent Orange", the achieved balance of the trio breaks: Blackfire, at the invitation of His Majesty Mille Petrozza, decides to join their cousins Kreator, with whom he will record, the following year, the excellent "Coma Of Souls". For this reason, "Better Off Dead" already appears on paper as an album, if not of rupture, certainly of distancing from what the band had offered so far.

The attack of the opener "An Eye For An Eye" dispels any doubts: it takes only a few bars, a couple of guitar riffs, and a handful of tupa-tupa to grasp the effects of a small revolution that occurred at the production level. Veteran Harris Johns (among the architects, among others, of that sonic apocalypse that was Pestilence's "Consuming Impulse"), called back to the control room after putting his signature on the previous album, opts for a sharper sound, in some ways cleaner and strangely compressed, which almost seems to want to leave behind the rough and vaguely mosquito-like tones of previous albums. This renewed sonic attire, albeit leaving many genre purists bewildered, in my opinion, does not compromise the overall quality of the album at all and, indeed, fits perfectly with the style of the new guitarist Michael Hoffman (coming from the Francescobusiani Assassin).

It is precisely the different approach reserved by the latter to the guitar, in fact, that constitutes an additional point of rupture with the trio's previous productions. In his rather brief career with Sodom, the good Frank Gosdzik always managed, in my opinion, to make the best use of the "few means at his disposal": his style was quite recognizable, with a vague proto-black flavor, with gritty single-string rhythms and harmonizations on fourth intervals, contrasted by solos, often in tapping, where a certain melody, a certain catchiness often found space. Hoffman, for his part, prefers to avoid embarrassing attempts at imitation and opts for a guitar work that is somewhat personal, on one hand, in the more intense tracks, built on surgical rhythms, with an almost American aftertaste ("Shellfire Defense" and "Tarred And Feathered"), and, on the other, winks, not even too subtly, at the more traditional heavy, if not outright hard rock tout court.

It is precisely this remarkable variety of sounds and genres that will be both a curse and a blessing for "Better Off Dead". Taken as a whole, in fact, the album perhaps even reveals itself as too varied for the standards of the time: on one hand, the speed of furious speed/thrash flashes (such as the very intense "Bloodtrails"), in which the band shows how they can still feel comfortable with tempos and solutions purely dedicated to sonic aggression, on the other, that mixture of passion and respect that has always linked the leader Angelripper with the origins of the metal genre closely. In fact, the album features two covers: the splendid "Turn Your Head Around" (a lost gem from Tank's discography, a very recommended band with a blatantly motorheadish style) and, even, in full hard rock revival, "Cold Sweat" by Thin Lizzy. But, even more, it is the presence of mid/mid up tempos like "The Saw Is The Law" and "Resurrection" (in which, at the end, vaguely epic choruses, absolutely inconceivable until the previous album, even appear!) that mark the distance from what the trio had produced until then.

Even in the most violent episodes, then, the album seems permeated by a more orderly and more reasoned approach, less frantic. The increased familiarity with their instruments (Witchunter's progress on drums are still documented today in the best metal encyclopedias under the entry "Miracle"), greater compositional maturity, and the elimination of that kind of necessity to sound "bad" at all costs (such as Angelripper's vocals, much more restrained here and, even more so than before, in pure Lemmy style), ensure that the album can enjoy a groove and immediacy entirely new to the band's sound.

"Better Off Dead", although it cannot boast the title of masterpiece, remains to this day an excellent album. It is well-played, varied, perhaps only penalized by an excessive number of songs that, at least on first listens, spoil it with a sort of "dispersiveness", but, above all, it represents the perfectly successful attempt of a band to detach from the intransigence that characterized their sound in previous albums, without forgoing their extreme nature.