Review Summary: I have smelled the taste of death, and it is good.
Most of you don't know metal. Most of you wouldn't know metal if your mother fed it to you for breakfast. Bolt Thrower is metal and more. Bolt Thrower is a mountain of metal, a mountain of crushing metal and vocals. The vocals in Bolt Thrower are what General Patton would sound like if he was still alive. Bolt Thrower is like a nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missile hitting your house. Bolt Thrower is like 25 barbarians being set free. If you see a dude on the subway listening to Bolt Thrower, you know. Everyone on the train knows. They know not to **** with that guy. Listening to Bolt Thrower is like trying to eat a bag of bolts.
Realm of Chaos. Bolt Thrower's second tour of many through the world of metal and war. From the beginning of this masterpiece you are opened to the onslaught of death by Karl Willetts' Patton-like vocals. If General Patton was around in these days he would listen to Bolt Thrower and nothing else. Karl snarls like Cerberus at the gates of the Underworld. He's that intense. I wouldn't be surprised if he's killed a man in hand-to-hand combat. Karl didn't need to change his name to some crap like Ape Shredder to sound like a crazed maniac. He was born that way. His lyrics hit home in a way few other lyrics do. Take for instance the crushing honesty of "All That Remains":
Shattered dreams forgotten
Body writhes in agony
Death bringing release now
From futile destiny
Through wreckage still burning
You look for signs of life
Find only rotting bodies
Scream in despair for mankind
Die
Of course as we all know, a vocalist is only as good as the guitarist next to him. Karl has three brutal guitarists next to him, one playing a bass. They wield their axes (guitars) like Mongolian horsemen severing the heads of innocent Siberian peasants. The riffs sound like the screams of children in fields of violence. They sound like machine guns puncturing your bowels as you charge the German beaches. They sound like grenades exploding all around you. They actually sound like war (trust me).
Andrew Whale, a drummer who needs no introduction isn't like those other drummers. He doesnt rely on pussy-sounding blast beats to convey his message which is: "Don't *** with me". I haven't seen Bolt Thrower live so I can't be sure, but I've been told Andrew Whale doesn't even use drumsticks, just his hands. What does that tell you? It means this guy would kick anyone's ass. This guy would take on Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all at once and kill them all without shedding an eyelash. He would invade Rome and rip Julius Caesar's balls off. He would punch Sun Tzu in the face so hard it would open a rift the entire country of China would fall into.
Every song on Realm of Chaos is enough to make weak men beg for mercy. They are as solid as the biceps of Conan the Barbarian. I can not think of one thing bad to say about this album, at all. Bolt Thrower named themselves after a boardgame played by a bunch of dorks, but they have turned the game into a violent, brutal nightmare of rape and sodomy. I highly recommend this for anyone who thinks they have balls.
