RITUAL

I have been running through these albums again which I have stored for many years without even giving them a second glance. Then PA arrived and I have to review them....... Life could had been worse.

I have got a lot of new respect for this band. This album though, Ritual as it is called, is their debut album and the fare here is thrash/speed metal bordering to death metal. Nothing fancy here. But you can still hear the band really pushing themselves. Pushing themselves and the envelope, that is. Within the strict confines of thrash/speed metal, Master's Hammer is operating on the fringes, trying to escape from this genre. In the process, Ritual got a sound which the melodic branch of the Norwegian black metal scene copied and made popular under the black metal umbrella. And I am talking about bands like Dimmu Borgir. Ritual was released in 1991. Dimmu Borgir copied it's sound and released their first two albums some years later with great success.

In short, the music on this album is both brutal and slightly melodic at the same time. The vocals in their native language is the usual black metal shrieks and fitting for this music. The quality is not that good though. The sound is great though. But for an old timer like myself, this is a pretty enjoyable album from a great band. Enjoyable for a short period, that is. But this album is for collectors only, I am afraid. Get the other Master's Hammer albums instead of Ritual.

2.5 stars

Although black metal is thought to have been largely pioneered in Scandinavia, the truth is that there were bands from all over the world that were jumping on around the same time, and in some cases, doing even better things than their Norwegian counterparts. Master's Hammer is one such act, originating from the then-recently communistic Czechoslovakia. Their debut album 'Ritual' is a record that is heavy on Bathory-esque riffs and atmosphere, a late addition to the first wave of black metal, but a very strong one all the same.

The lyrics here are growled and rasped in Czech; Storm is a frontman who aligns himself with the traditional black metal style of vocals, but his delivery if somewhat more decipherable than other bands whose voicework sounded closer to a garble. The fact that an English-speaking person such as myself still cannot understand what he is actually saying makes the language really haunting. Master's Hammer is built around buzzy guitars, punkish drums, and a somewhat more bass-heavy sound that the Norwegian black metal. All the same, the influence of early Bathory is very evident in what the band is doing here, with some sounds of raw thrash blending in with the black metal direction that the band was taking.

On top of the straightforward guitar work and drums, Master's Hammer makes great use of symphonic keyboard elements, using a choir synth to accentuate some of the more atmospheric moments on this album. Need I say that this was a pretty inventive thing to do in black metal at the time, and the band pulls it off very well; it is interesting to hear something so smooth pressed up against the angry-sounding metal sound that the band has for themselves here. The album rarely lets up its thrashy pace, but there are some good guitar parts here where they absolve the straightforward nature and pull off some surprisingly technical and dissonant leads.

'Ritual' is an essential album for the raw sound of black metal's first wave, and even ahead of its time, when compared to their generally less-mature contemporaries. Master's Hammer would only get better with their classic 'Jilemnicky Okultista', but this debut on its own distinguishes them in the early black metal scene.