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CRUENTATOR
Ain’t War Hell?

Xtreem Music (2018)
Rating: 7.5/10

Cruentator are a fairly new thrash metal band hailing from Como in Italy and this is their first outing. Eight tracks, 30-minutes of thrash… and that’s about it.

The combo are very much surfing on the waves of the “new wave of old school thrash” that has been battering us for the last couple of decades. This is the sort of festering, frothing, and rabid high-tempo velocity we’ve come to expect from a whole host of bands that are intent on marrying together the Teutonic forces of, say, Destruction, with the flailing of Slayer, while still hinting at the newer breed of aggression with those streaks of, say, Warbringer.

It’s fast, pounding, aggressive no frills belligerence built upon a thundering percussive performance of Riccardo, who rarely stops for breath from opener ‘Merciless Extermination’ to closer ‘Cluster Terror’. His wild yet well-executed patterns of pace perfectly compliment the driving, well-oiled bass trundles of Vanni, whose turbulent fits worm their way through the frantic, smouldering piles of Omar’s ripping guitar.

Raw, primal rage is the order of the day here as the band is led through the debris-strewn jungles by squawking frontman Ambro, who spends half-an-hour spitting, coughing, and vomiting up shards of metal and clumps of dust, as in non-poetic fashion he spins rugged tales of napalm bombardment, incendiary devices, poisoned air, acid rain, global pandemic, and unleashing the impetuous mastiffs of war. It’s blistering chaos from an Italian troop who sounds as if they’ve emerged from the trenches with only death on their minds.

Ain’t War Hell? Is simply one of those well-armoured tanks which bulldozes its way into the ears, mashes the brain, gouges out the eyes and leaves the skull splintered. It’s an unnerving display of a thrash holocaust delivered with barbaric intensity and rarely veering from its destructive path.

‘Tyrants Of The Wasteland’, ‘Barbaric Violence’, ‘Evil Is Prowling Around’ and ‘Marching Into A Minefield’ couldn’t be more self-explanatory. But look beyond those titles, and become engulfed within the fires of a sizzling, sordid thrash effort of raging riffs, percussive crushing and vocal angst. It’s not original, and it’s not overly intelligent, give or take the usual thrash panoramas whereby a slower segment of menace is introduced and a fiery solo emerges from the smog and spirals like a flare. However, there’s no hiding from the overall angriness of this grizzly, war-torn expression in which a bunch of what I assume are friends have gathered together to create a record whose only aim is to annihilate all senses.

Ain’t War Hell? is straight up thrash metal of limited design. But who cares when you’ve been hit by another wave of bludgeoning riffage and that fatal drum avalanche. “Detonation, conflagration, infiltration, devastation!” screams Ambro on ‘Marching Into A Minefield’, and that just about sums up this unrelenting, stubborn and above all violent slab.

But as ‘Cluster Terror’ brings the album to a close, I can only leave you with the last line of this tour de force. “And there’s no way to avoid your death” yelps Ambro, as Cruentator once again comes together to riddle the body with gunfire so remorseless that when the war is over the sky is still raining bullets.

Neil Arnold

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