Imagine around the mid 80s and the most vicious and evil of the metal bands. Celtic Frost, Slayer, Venom. Chicago's Lair of the Minotaur draw their influences from these metal icons primarily. Their first two albums on Southern Lord were sort of a revelation for yours truly along with discovering Unearthly Trance at the same time. Both were Celtic Frost influenced, but the end product sounded totally different. While Unearthly Trance churns out doom metal at the end of the day, Lair is rooted firmly in thrash.

War Metal Battle Master, funnily titled, is their third album and still on Southern Lord, they continue to write thrash epics with lyrics based on Greek Mythology. The music too, continues to deliver more of what the first two did. The production is raw and gritty, especially with the incredibly heavy, fuzzy and in your face guitars, this one quite remarkably stands out among all these new bands reliving the thrash of the old. While the blasphemous fast paced headbang material often bordering early death metal is the recurring sound here, the music stands out really when the band slows down. For the biggest sludgiest slowing down though, you'll have to wait till the nine minuter Doomtrooper towards the end of the album. What begins like a soundtrack to an epic battle, carries on with some mean down-tuned slow sludgefest, and this, to me, brings out what these blokes are capable of in full force.

This one is for all you old school brutal thrash fans and the new kids to check out how metal is to be done without the modern day production abuse and tedious songwriting. That said, the band really peaked on their previous album Ultimate Destroyer and this one just hasn't managed to live up to that. Damn good ass kicker still, so drench yourself in blood and play the fuck out of this album... or just settle down in front of your computer screen like me and watch this instead. Just in case you didn't know these guys fucking mean it.



Label: Southern Lord
Year of Release: 2008