(Wea/Earache Records)
Speed up your basic Danzig record, add some Don Airey keyboard lines, drag Mastodon’s vocals into it and you have these Danish thrashers, who rip it up with some Buck-Dharma-like leads for added gravitas. As with most of this sort of product, key changes are a rarity – there’s huge interchangeability between songs 3 through 7 for instance – and quite frankly this has been done so many times it’s jolly ponderous that labels are still cranking them out. Onward we slog, though, seeking grains of wheat in all the chaff; what Urkraft does it does well, exhibiting a militaristic tightness and tunnel-vision enthusiasm. What would break them away from the pack, being that they’ve grudgingly added keys as it stands, would be the addition of some laptop-isms, because there’s a lot of catching up to do with more forward-thinking outfits like In Flames – the quota for Slayer clones is met for the next 60 years by now. Drum machine would be nice too – Ministry rocks, you know. And better haircuts maybe. Or big rubber monster masks. Order from Amazon.com
