Ah, the famed first release of Euronymous' Deathlike Silence Productions. Sort of. I recently picked up the reissued version Osmose put out last year which includes four bonus live tracks from 1991. It's a great album chock-full of old-school thrashy death metal, very fast and intense - even with the four bonus tracks, the total running time is barely 38 minutes. Riff-wise it sounds quite Scandinavian (i.e. along the lines of Old Funeral, Morbid, and maybe early Entombed), but the songs are much faster and frantic, almost chaotic - I hear quite a bit of classic thrash influence like Destruction and Kreator here. Songs like the opener "Pure Hate" and the title track are total thrash-fests. Another high point is the slower, crunchy 'epic' (barely over 4 minutes) "Dying World". The sound is quite vintage, but that's to be expected; after all, this was recorded in 1989. It's got that reverbed-but-dry drum sound and slightly mid-rangey guitars.

Like I mentioned before, the Osmose-reissued version has four bonus tracks, live songs from a gig in 1991. Three (Bestial Death, The Awakening, and Pure Hate) are featured on the album proper, and the fourth is "Nuclear Death", which is (I assume) a track from their demo. If you've got the original DSP version, don't kill yourself trying to get these tracks - They are soundboard recordings, but the mix is mostly bass and drums, with a pathetically thin guitar sound and the (great) vocals just somewhere in the middle except on the loud screams. The performance is good, and are worth getting if you don't have this album already, but nothing terribly essential. Should I also mention that the brain trust at Osmose spelled the band name "Mercilenss" on the spine? I don't know...

© 2000 lord vic