Sodom - 1982 EP (2023)

Sodom pays tribute to its own year of formation with a moderately paced new track, lyrics that are self-referential but not cheesy as you'd expect, more about the band's personal perseverance across decades when so many others had faltered or given up. This one has all the trappings you'd expect, from fast and nasty explosions to mid paced riffs, the latter of which are honestly kind of dull here, but it's all drowned in the whipping leads and energetic frenzy that they've put into a lot of their recent full-length studio efforts, and Tom's vocals still sounds admittedly awesome. The mix is also quite good, capturing a lot of the raw fury of the youth the band is giving homage to, but at the standards you'd expect 40 years later.

As for the rest of the 1982 EP, it's re-recordings of old tracks and not terribly exciting. That's not to say it isn't any good, because "Witching Metal" and "Victims of Death" are given a treatment similar to what the Cavaleras did recently with Morbid Visions and Bestial Devastation, just the power of today's studio abilities plastered onto a couple tunes from the band's earliest demos, and sounding more propulsive and aggressive for the effort. As someone who wasn't always thrilled with the sound quality on Sodom's earliest recordings, and a huge fan of their 40 Years at War compilation from a couple years ago, it's good to get more, but with the limited environment of 18 minute EP it's not exciting for very long, since you know there've been a good number of tunes left out and this could have been folded up into a 'Part II' of that excellent collection, and there's just no novelty whatosever. It blazes right past you, and sounds good, especially the vocals and leads, the intense drumming, which most importantly  proves this band has no intention of halting with age...it's full forward, combat boots, Teutonic thrash terror forevermore, just there isn't a lot of dynamic range here to keep me interested, and the new tune is just okay.

Verdict: Indifference [6/10]

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