Artist: Thunderbolt
Country: Poland
Label: Agonia Records / ISO666
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2003
What we have here is the Polish band Thunderbolt. Only the looks of the CD says enough about the content. The usual cover with a goat and the logo. Raw and old-fashioned blackmetal. And the band doesn’t surprise us with this, and supplies us with dirty old school black metal, with a touch of deathmetal. But I didn’t get a biography or any other additional information with this album, so I can’t tell you a lot about this. My copy of this CD is scratched, so the last two tracks can’t be played. So my apologies if things are stated wrongly.
The fist time I heard it I wasn’t too surprised. It all sounded alike to me, and nothing special. But when I heard it some more times I really began liking it. Really great and fast up tempo blackmetal, somewhat in the vein of early Emperor (“In The Nightside Eclipse”) and the later mid 90’s period of Mayhem (“Wolf’s Lair Abyss”). Nice up-tempo classic blackmetal without any modern influences, that’s sometimes alternated with some nice keyboards (and no, this absolutely doesn’t sound like Cradle Of Filth or Dimmu Borgir at all) or clean/acoustic guitars. This album contains quite much everything a good black metal album needs to be nice listen: fast drums, great riffing, howling vocals and a grim atmosphere. This kind of blackmetal is all about atmosphere, and this album contains the right atmosphere, a grim and evil touch finishes the album. A great release for all fans of old school blackmetal or fast yet somewhat melodic blackmetal in general. To me a nice effort for sure!
