Heavy, Power and almost forgotten Speed Metal miraculously exist even nowadays. Not so bright as it was, let’s say, 30 years ago, but this genre can be hardly called “dead”. Because except the titans of Heavy like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden there are lots of bands that are ready to pick up, to keep and to elevate up to the skies the banner of true metal (if they would be really lucky). Well, German Turbokill is one of these bands.
Turbokill was formed not a long time ago, in 2017. So under the belts of Stephan Dietrich (vocals), Ronny Schuster (rhythm guitar), Daniel Kanzler (solo guitar), Marco “Fox” Grünwald (bass) and Philipp “Nafta” Dießl (drums) there is only one EP with a lot of ambitions. And soon their debut album Vice World will be released.
12 songs of the album are a mix of Heavy, Speed and a little bit Power Metal. Meanwhile the listener can easily determine not only bands, which inspired these guys, but even some songs. In other words, you can boldly name any band of these genres: Turbokill will just amicably nod and give you some recognizable pieces. But don’t hurry up to blame the band with plagiarism, there’s no such thing in an album (straight plagiarism at least). It’s because of narrow framework of the genre and the big heritage that the bands from 80s leaved us.
The good example for this “hey-it-seems-so-similar” could be “War Thunder” and “Fortress Of The Universe”: these are fast, aggressive and melodic songs, though when vocalist Stephan Dietrich raises his voice, these songs sounds very similar to Kiske’s era Helloween.
With this, Vice World is quite diverse album. Here you can find some Glam Metal in “Global Monkey Show” (at least it’s Heavy Metal in major key) and some Speed Metal from the times of Painkiller (“Turbokill”). And of course a lot of Heavy: “Don’t Deal With The Devil” and “Vice World” are the typical classic Heavy Metal songs; “Track N’Spy” is some kind of oldschool Teutonic “Scorpions meet Accept” Heavy. However, “Sailing With Pirates” musically reminds early Hammerfall albums with some Running Wild lyrics.
At the same time there is some fly in the ointment: “End Of Days”, which for some reason was released as the first single is a trivial song with guitar riffs that were played and heard for thousands times. I really don’t understand why exactly this song when there are lots of other good songs in an album. Well, that’s the case when you should not judge a book by its cover.
For the records, few words about album’s cover: a monopoly game that shows situation in modern society implies some social element in lyrics and that’s true. At least, “Global Monkey Show” criticize the modern consumption society pretty well and “Track N’ Spy” do it with modern transparency and availability of everyone nowadays. “Everyone is permanently available but that means we can also be constantly monitored. Do we really want that?” Dietrich asks
Ok, let’s sum up: Vice World is in superposition: on one hand there are extremely recognizable riffs, bridges and melodies (one more time: it’s not a plagiarism), on the other hand it sounds solid and surprisingly fresh. Yeah, some kind of Heavy Metal dialectic in 2019. So I think you should give a chance to this album. Maybe it will not surprise you, but it will cheer you up and probably add a couple of songs in your everyday playlist. So it goes, like Vonnegut said. Also I’m pretty sure that Turbokill has a great future ahead.
Vice World will be released on October, 25 via Steamhammer/SPV.
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