TANKARD Alcoholic Metal 2LP BLACK [VINYL 12"]

Tankard is probably the longest-running German Thrash Metal band of all time. They never wavered from the path, never split up and re-united. I am pretty sure that as long as vocalist Gerre is alive, there will always be Tankard. This, however, has led to the fact that there are very few Best Of and compilation albums around. No superfluous B-Side collections or cheaply produced live retrospectives. “Alcoholic Metal” features very early Tankard demo material, which has only been around on tape. Gerre explains: “Before our first album ‘Zombie Attack’ was released in 1986, we produced two official demo tapes: ‘Heavy Metal Vanguard’ in 1984 and ‘Alcoholic Metal’ a year later.” Of course, both are featured on the High Roller vinyl release. Gerre carries on: “From ‘Heavy Metal Vanguard’ two songs made it onto our debut album ‘Zombie Attack’, namely ‘Alcohol’ and ‘Mercenary’. No less than five songs from our second demo tape ‘Alcoholic Metal’ found their way to ‘Zombie Attack’: the title track ‘Zombie Attack’, ‘Mercenary’, ‘Poison’, ‘Acid Death’ and ‘Screaming Victims’. In addition to that, we recorded a new version of ‘Alien’ with different lyrics for our mini-album from 1989. A couple of other demo tracks appeared on even later Tankard albums: ‘Death by Whips’ (‘Disco Destroyer’, 1998), ‘Incredible Loudness’ (‘Kings of Beer’, 2000) and ‘Rundown Quarter’ (‘B-Day’, 2002).” The recordings you can hear on “Alcoholic Metal” have not been re-mixed or re-mastered. According to Gerre, there is a reason for this: “We wanted to keep the recordings 100% authentic! Label boss Steffen even wanted to have our original cassette tapes for the vinyl mastering. He did not really trust the CD-R version which was available as a bonus disc for ‘B-Day’.”
There are a lot of bands around who do not really stand behind their very early recordings anymore but Gerre sees it differently: “As we have seen, a lot of the early Tankard compositions later resurfaced on our albums. That in itself speaks for the good songwriting quality! Of course I am 100% behind our early material, only the sound quality could have been better. But then again we are talking about the early ‘80’s here ...”
Talking about bad sound quality, I am the proud owner of a couple of really early pre-“Zombie Attack” Tankard live tapes. Indeed, they have a lousy sound. How does Gerre feel about that? He says: „Well, on the one hand I get very nostalgic and think it’s funny but as you said, the sound on some of them is really bad. I have been searching for Tankard vinyl bootlegs but have not found a single one! However, we ourselves will not put out any of the early live recordings as the sound standard is definitely too low.”
Quite a few of the early Tankard compositions have something to do with different films. You just need to think about “Zombie Attack” itself or “Alien”. Were horror flicks an inspiration for Tankard? Gerre confirms: “Absolutely true! After school, we always met at Axel’s place. Only our guitarist owned a video player back then. Those were bloody expensive in the early ‘80’s. We watched everything back then, some gross shit, you can believe me ...”
Matthias Mader