Album Review: Sodom - Tapping The Vein (Deluxe Expanded Edition)
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Between the Vulcano remasters and this, if you’re an old school thrash fan you are eating very well right now. Sodom are thrash royalty, but you know this already. What you might not know, is much of their stuff outside of their immortal Agent Orange album. By 1992, thrash metal’s star was already fading. Perhaps for that reason, Tapping the Vein often gets overlooked, and while I will never forgive an injustice of that magnitude, it rather is what it is. Thank the good lord then that you have here an opportunity to redress this heinous travesty. A few years back I went through the entire Sodom discography; even by Sodom’s own mighty standard, Tapping the vein immediately stood out as one of their most belligerent, apocalyptically heavy albums. I worship before the pitch altar of In the Sign of Evil. I greet Persecution Mania with sheer jubilation. Agent Orange is a stone cold classic, unassailable in it’s brilliance. But it’s Tapping the Vein that, for me, wears the cinder spewing crown of Sodom’s discography.
Every single thing that I look for in a thrash metal album Sodom smash clear of the stratosphere on Tapping the Vein. Acid, irresistible and blistering, floods from every pore denaturing and dissolving all it touches. The withering cyclone of blades that is “The Crippler” dices the competition into seeping giblets with razor sharp efficiency, whereas “One Step Over the Line” is a tungsten steamroller crushing an enemy frontline into crimson paste with a hideous midpaced crunch. Deep Cut “Hunting Season” is a tour de force of barbed riffs and distilled shock and awe percussion played at appalling, violent tempo. The title track allows a brief respite for your head to peer terrified above the trench on it’s chorus, only for the cannonade of it’s verse riffs to punch your head clear off your shoulders. This isn’t an album, it’s a broadside launched with the sole objective of total obliteration. At first light, “Body Parts” fires a wall of lead into huddled walls of routed foemen, dislimbed corpses crashing mutilated and steaming onto churned earth. If Sodom’s early work was integral to the formation of Black Metal with the seminal In the Sign of Evil EP, then Tapping the Vein represents their closest alignment to the grisly demesne of black metal’s esteemed extreme metal sibling death metal. Sodom are really, REALLY pissed off here, and the devastation wrought in consequence is a sight to behold.
Everywhere I look Tapping the Vein is swollen with songs that lesser bands would kill for. Closer “Reincarnation” is a morose behemoth that comes leering and scornful at nightfall like some biblical plague to snatch the life from those fool enough to think they could hide; malodorous, unsettling bass work scores dire auguries of pain to come in the flesh of the fallen as drums punch like nails through the song. Even at it’s most lighthearted the album is crushing. “Wachturm” is Motorhead if they were born German, and while it’s punk adjacent style isn’t precisely my stein of weissbier, it’s by no conceivable extent a bad song – Sodom have (as you can see yourself from the bonus disks) played this live, and they’ve always had a strong affinity for punk. It’s swaggering, boisterous sound energises and courses, a million times more convincing than even Sodom themselves were on their Get What You Deserve record (which is for the most part a hardcore punk album). This song – and “Bullet in Your Head”, which similarly leans more towards the Punk side of things – represent the only parts of Tapping the Vein which I’m not entirely, helplessly in love with. But that’s a personal thing – if you do enjoy hardcore injected into your thrash, if you’re more on board with crossover thrash than me, then I think you’ll love these two songs.
There is nothing – literally nothing – bad that I have to say about Tapping the Vein, and I’m overjoyed about the potential that a remastered edition presents for more people to engage with it. Sodom are sovereigns of the old guard, titanic figures with armfuls of immaculate releases to dispense at will. Regardless of when this album was released it remains now and forever probably the best thing they have ever released, which puts it in the running for one of the best thrash albums ever crafted by mortal hands. It’s a masterpiece, the very seraphim themselves incapable of rendering superior thrash art unto man. Production wise, I almost wish that every album sounded like this. Vocals jagged and reverberant, bass heaving and brawny, guitars shearing through the mix, and the drumkit a veritable arsenal of high-calibre artillery pushing mile-deep craters into the planet’s mantle. If you have heard this album, then revisit it. Immediately. If you have not heard it, then I do not concede you to be a worthy member of metaldom until you have, with appropriate shame and repentance, corrected that grievous error.
The bonus material is an assortment of live tracks and alternative versions spread over a mammoth four additional disks. Good stuff, worthy of adding to your collection, but the key thing you, I, and every other living and breathing organism that paws aimlessly about our little dirtball as it swirls around the galaxy is the album itself. At the risk of belabouring the point, Tapping the vein is mandatory listening for anyone with even a passing interest in thrash metal. 10/10, full marks, A*, whatever system of assessment you prefer, just go out and get this fucking thing rammed into your ear holes with all possible alacrity.