Review: Blitzkrieg “A Time of Changes” [Neat Records]

After various years of releasing demos and an album with Satan, the legendary vocalist Brian Ross finally managed to bring out with this project a debut album with studio versions of tracks only available beforehand as demos. The differences between each of them are clear. While the demo versions projected a dirtier sound, the studio versions had a different guitar distortion and a more polished production. It does not mean that these studio versions are necessarily better since the demos are, to a certain extent, more attractive, especially “Blitzed Alive”.

The release is good from the beginning to the end, and the first part is great. “Inferno” is a good opening number: great riffs and high-intensity drumming. It leads to an unasked question: have you ever noticed that Metallica wrote a similar intro for “Hit the Lights”? “Blitzkrieg” sounds like a renewed version of the punkish number appearing in the early demos. In fact, this is not the version covered by Metallica. These songs are precisely a point of comparison between the demos and the studio release. At first impression, the studio versions do not hold the same energy as the demo songs, which is clearly reflected in the two aforementioned songs. Much of these differences are mainly a result of the production refining and all the sound engineering behind the recording of Blitzkrieg‘s debut.

The rest of the album is not different in production, exemplified by other numbers like “Armageddon”. “Pull the Trigger” a cover from the other Brian Ross’ project Satan (part of the 1982’s demo “Into the Fire”), is a more commercial number. It is not as heavy as Satan’s version. This song is another example of how Blitzkrieg was more aligned to certain commercial standards that took out some of the heaviness and energy that characterized their early works or the early stuff from Satan. Fortunately, this alignment does not seriously affect the band’s sound. Still, more work could have been done with the album to make it an authentic heavy metal machine. With this in mind, the only conclusion is that the album itself is a worthy piece for NWOBHM fanatics. Still, if you are just getting into it, you should definitely give a try to the compilations circulating here and there.