Happy Fukking Holocaust

There are quite a few bands from Norway playing nasty black thrash metal and the demo of Töxik Death puts them right in the mix with the nastiest of the lot. Just to clarify, this isn’t nasty because it’s grim and blackened to the core, but because it just about toes the line between being “ugly” and enjoyable. There are several factors that contribute to this assessment, which I plunge into below.

Most obviously, the vocals on Happy Fukkin Holocaust are nasty: raw, ugly, punky shit that sounds a bit like Abigail and Barbatos from Japan, whose singers always seen to be blind drunk and in need of an English lesson or two. It’s like A.H. (the members of Töxik Death have snappy initials instead of names) had a bottle of whiskey and then decided to record a YouTube rant about various things he disliked, such as killing posers, killing whores, and a general disdain for humanity. Of course, the bottle of vodka means that he doesn’t dress it up in metaphors, but just calls the songs ‘Die Poser Die’, ‘You Will Fukking Die’, and ‘Fukking Whore’, previously the much better named ‘The Number of the Whore’ on the original version, which might even be a detective story waiting to be written. He then sort of opens his mouth and lets everything spill out without enunciation or care for our ears.

The band also sounds quite primitive but more bearable, opting for simplistic thrash of mild early Kreator proportions, especially if the unfortunate solo on ‘Human Trash’ is anything to go by. The selling point is that Töxik Death seem to have got drunk and listened to Discharge before recording with that notion, so that the fast drumming is more like d-beat than blastbeat and the guitars not so sharp or brutal as in most thrash metal. The clatter of ‘You Will Fukking Die’ is the occasion on which this veers closest to black metal, the result sounding similar to compatriots Condor, who were in fact not even in the picture at the time of this demo though developed more quickly later on.

That longer song just mentioned is perhaps the most satisfying of the regular cuts, though I’m reviewing the version with ‘Soldier of the Wasteland’ as a bonus, which steals the double award of having the most skillful riffing and the most horrible vocals on this brief EP. Whatever the roughness of the experience on Happy Fukkin Holocaust, it shouldn’t be regarded with too much seriousness, since Töxik Death took a five year gap to deliver their next release, which was a demo in any case and leant closer to black metal. This might well have been the foundations of a project fuelled by a random bout of drunken enthusiasm.


-- May Diamhea's feat of 100 reviews in 7 days remain unbeaten --