Beast Of Bourbon

Back in the early 2000's I was starting to get interested in metal after taking a ten year hiatus. I was digging back into those old albums that I loved in 80's, and I was interested in checking out new bands as well and oddly enough I found myself digging a bunch of Nu Metal bands for a few years as well. Linkin Park. Slipknot. Limp Bizkit. Powerman 5000. Man, that was a strange fucking time. Anyway, as we worked our way into the mid-2000's, I left that Nu Metal stuff behind and discovered that bands were still kicking around and doing straight up metal and thrash.

Tankard were an 80's German thrash band, and I loved their first few albums that Noise Records released. I hadn't thought about that band for years, and since I was starting to get interested in checking out newer metal releases again, I figured that I'd grab a copy of the lastest Tankard album at the time, Beast Of Bourbon, and give it a shot. That album blew me away and helped to reinvigorate my love for metal and checking out new shit. Tankard hadn't changed at all from the Alien EP that they had released 15 years earlier. Straight up thrash.

Of course back in 2004/2005 I wasn't buying a lot of new metal albums...but I was certainly downloading a bunch of them. I had stacks of CDRs of stuff that I'd grabbed off of Soulseek or WinMX or whatever sharing tool I was using at the time. Here we are 15+ years later, and I'm finally buying myself a proper version of that Beast Of Bourbon album. It has seen a couple different pressings since it's original release, but I grabbed this nice looking magenta vinyl version from 2019. 100 pressed.

Total Addiction

After reading the story of Noise Records, Damn The Machine, a couple of years ago, it dawned on me that in addition to collecting original pressings for Metal Blade, Megaforce and Combat, I needed to round out the Big 4 for 80's metal record labels, and add Noise to the list. I've slowly been adding those original Noise records to the collection, and when I was grabbing Kreator's Extreme Aggression from a German seller on Discogs, I figured that I'd check to see if he had anything else from the Noise label.

While I've got the straight edge, and find absolutely nothing appealing about drinking and beer culture, I do love thrash metal, and even though just about every song from Tankard's Chemical Invasion album is about beer and getting drunk, I still can't resist headbanging like a maniac to this record. Chemical Invasion was Tankard's second album, and back in the 80's, I loved everything from the Zombie Attack debut, straight through to the Alien EP. I lost track of Tankard by the time they released The Meaning Of Life back in 1990, so there is a large chunk of their discography that I really haven't heard. I might have to remedy that soon!

I still have a long way to go with my Noise collection, but I'm slowly getting there. Hopefully I can keep making some steady progress because the label has so many metal classics that I need to get my hands on.