This new batch of reissues spans a wide range of bands not only from Great Britain and America, but also from Central Europe and Asia. Also, we see how Metal Mind is not the only hard-working label executing the big task of reissuing old classics. Here we include reissues from Sweden's mighty doom vault I Hate and from America's versatile house The End. Lastly, these reissues not only include the secular but also the Christian and the Satanic. Everyone gets their little something.  Read on and spread the word.

I am very surprised by Czech Republic’s Root (pictured above). I read every promo sheet with much skepticism. I understand that is the label’s job to blow out of every band’s asshole but when they say that Root plays somber and menacing black metal, they fucking mean it. The Book (Red Black, 1999), Root’s fifth full-length, isn’t exactly your stereotypical black metal album. For starters this is one of the few recordings that is orchestrated and ambitious and doesn’t come off as ridiculous and overblown. Root play it at mid tempo, which gives their arrangements plenty of room to breathe, and which gives their tunes certain ‘doom’ allure.  The promo sheet reads verbatim, ‘if The Satanic Bible had been composed into music the hymnal The Book would have been the result’. And sure, why not? The sound is very esoteric. LaVey hated rock music but the cool orchestrations give The Book certain wicked classic elegance. To me achieving a balance between rock and orchestration is enough of an accomplishment, but here every song works.   This re-release by I Hate Records includes four bonus tracks three of which are bare demo versions of songs included in the album.

Rewind eight years and Root were a much more bipolar band. Hell Symphony (Zeras, 1991) is as ambitious as the albums that would follow but also reveals a very crude band. This is the second album of the band and in a way is much more direct in its intentions and much less atmospheric. The voice of vocalist Big Boss for instance is very much in the grandpa black metal vein of the early 90’s. It is more evil sounding but it is not as enjoyable nor as unique as the one exposed in The Book. Musically, Root very much knew what they wanted to do as most of the songs are delivered in a sure footed mid tempo. However there are songs where Root switches to fast tempos (“Abaddon”) and deliver a fucking riff stompfest and there are occasions where the band just goes berserk and bad trip tribal-like during the hippie satanic free jam of “Satan." Hell Symphony is more colorful, but also less focused.

The next record is the 1995 reissue (Magnetic Air) of Exciter’s 1988 self-titled fifth full-length (Maze Music). Besides this reissue Megaforce repackaged this album in 2005 and re-released it as O.T.T. I have a soft spot for these Canadians. Exciter and I go way back, you see.  As a kid, I remember listening to my older brother’s vinyl copies of Heavy Metal Maniac (Shrapnel, 1983) and Violence & Force (Megaforce, 1984) whenever he was out. I was always in awe at how Dan Beehler was able to sing and play drums at the same time. I always thought of Dan as a deity of some form.  Especially endearing are his high notes, which here happen about every two seconds. I also remember not digging neither album too much, but for some reason I kept spinning them.  This album shows some evolution which makes it more enjoyable. The guitars are pretty killer (some solos are incendiary) and even Dan’s drumming displays some gusto not shown before. Beehler’s vocals remain an acquired taste, but for the classic metal lover they should go down like punch. 

One of the few differential traits of Brutality’s second album When the Sky Turns Black (Nuclear Blast, 1995) is that it doesn’t start with an intro. In other words, there isn’t much that sets this Tampa band apart from the rest of their early 90’s cohorts. Except perhaps quality and the two angelic sounding acoustic instrumentals the band places in between songs.  Say what you like about the Morrisound Studios death metal sound, I believe most of their early recordings suffer of tepid sound. In the case of When the Sky Turns Black, this remastered Metal Mind edition enjoys a bolstered live sound that is as crunchy as it is deafening. That’s evident in their refreshing Black Sabbath cover of “Electric Funeral”.  The rest of the songs walk an enjoyable line between early standard Florida death metal (with flourishing guitar technique) and doom. Last thing I heard Brutality is back together. 

Japan’s Sigh has crafted a career out of being unpredictable. Like many who started playing plain Satan worshipping corpsepaint donning black metal Sigh too eventually grew out of that phase and branched out into other subgenres like progressive and experimental. By the time Imaginary Sonicscapes was released (Century Media, 2001) their sound was so beyond their initial roots it was hard to believe this was the same band that once covered a Venom tune. A few things that will get you addicted to Imaginary Sonicscapes are those catchy pseudo power metal riffs, the fluent tempo progressions, the complicated shifts, the psychedelic sounds of a minimoog, a vocoder, a Fender Rhodes Hammond and even the disco bit on the convoluted "A Sunset Song".  And if you’ve heard the original version and were discouraged by the ambitious songwriting and the poor sound, well The End had James Murphy remaster the album and it sounds titifuckinglating.

Diamond Head may have been essential to the development of metal music but on Canterbury (MCA, 1983), their third album, they proved that their price for whoredom was just as low as that of anyone willing to break for a buck. Canterbury is, how do you say?...a piece of shit. It sucks. It reminds me of that lame synth heavy sound that Jefferson Airplane adopted when they switched monikers to Jefferson Starship and started writing crap like “We Built This City”. Hell, some of the songs even sound like Huey Lewis & The News. All that’s missing is the harmonica and the power of love. It’s horrible. There is not a trace of the old band here. This isn’t even the real Diamond Head. Apparently, after the initial success of their first two albums (Lightning to the Nations and Borrowed Time) the band caved in to label pressures to oust Duncan Scott (drums) and Colin Kimberly (bass) and with a new lineup reinforced by Procol Harum’s keyboardist Josh Phillips-Gorse the band wrote this calmed and poppy turd. Hey, the title track is a soporific piano ballad. Upon its release, it was found that Canterbury’s first 20,000 copies had a problem which caused the needle to jump. Considering how lame this record is that may have been a good thing.  

Fuck Destroyer and Strutter. Germany’s Warhammer is the ultimate tribute band.  To prove that this trio got so into the gimmick they ended up creating their own brand of Hellhammer-like worshipping doom. Towards the Chapter of Chaos is the rawest of the Warhammer bunch getting the treatment by Metal Mind because it predates any of their official releases. This limited digipack includes the band’s 1997 five-song demo along with some rehearsal recordings taped between 1998 and 2001 ensuring that what we get is the most primitive this band could get. And it shows. There isn’t much difference between the demo tracks and the rehearsals. In all, we get a scuzzy downtuned and atonal guitarist, a sloppy drummer who can barely keep up and a vocalist that mimics Gabriel Warrior quite faithfully. The purity of these recordings is charming, but get five songs deep into Towards the Chapter of Chaos and it gets to be enough of a good thing. Listening to Warhammer’s next recordings proved that evolution wasn’t the key, practice was.

By the time Spheres was released in 1993, Pestilence was far removed from the thrash death metal sound that had characterized their first release Malleus Maleficarum only six years before. Line up changes and a turn towards intricate technique took the place of aggression and brutality and in this, Pestilence’s last full-length before their break up, the band plays a pretty non aggressive linear kind of progressive metal. The jazz influences of guitarist Patrick Mameli are clear. He riffs angular hook-less notes and solos with a progressive clean mind and sings with a raw blistering approach over mild melodic lines. The bass of Jeroen Paul Thesseling is even more clear, showed along modulating plenty of fluent playing. It is clearly noted in the album sleeve that there were no keyboards used on the making of Spheres, but the presence of synthesizers is almighty. As a bonus the Metal Mind reissue includes three remixed songs and two live versions recorded in 1993. Also, the cover artwork features unused Dan Seagrave artwork. Not as spectacular as the original artwork for sure.

Can the world have enough Mortification? Fuck yeah! I had enough of this Aussie band after the first time I heard them.  Aaaahhh, the gig of a scribe can be a tough one sometimes. Anyway, Mortification is very well-known for being one of the most successful Christian metal bands. The problem is not in their philosophy, the problem is in the shittiness of some of their albums. Some are quite decent, but others reek quite badly. In the case of Envision Evangelene (Nuclear Blast, 1996), Mortification’s sixth studio full-length,  what surprises is how pointless and ambitious some of the songs seem. The album opens with an eight-part eighteen-minute futile exercise in biblical storytelling.  It’s ambitious, it’s long, it has throbbing basslines, it’s got lots of people chanting at once, it’s got piano and a discernible growl and it sucks. In fact, it succeeds pretty greatly at sucking. It’s like a poorly written Christian metal opera. It’s more over the top than a hat on a giraffe. But get past the bullshit and what we have is some comical Christian death and thrash metal album with some decent guitar solos for spice. And don’t even get me started with the production job. Laughable from whichever angle you see it, but pretty entertaining nevertheless.