Year Of Metal #021: Sodom - Code Red

German metal survivors were nine records deep when they released this 1999 return to pure thrash, which seems to merit at least a top half finish in their overall ranking from most fans.  I can see why they’d inspire cult-like devotion from a lot of metal heads. Perhaps most important are the vocals from longest serving member Tom Angelripper. Not unlike Scottish football commentators, the German accent is a bit of a cheat code, adding a lot to his already fully invested snarl. 

Then there are the guitars which, at their best, sound truly mangled. The title track is probably the album’s high point. Aside from passages of trad-thrash picking, the guitars wail like sirens or glom onto the drums. It’s a frenzied tangle of a song that aims for genuine menace and actually pulls it off, which is no mean feat. 

I like “Tombstone”, too, one of the album’s more distinctive cuts. There aren’t enough metal tracks about shootouts in the old west, but it’s fair to say this is one of the better ones. Sodom slow it down a little and add space to the mix. The riffs are on point and there’s a lot of groove to an instrumental middle eight. While there’s quite a lot of kitsch to the album, “Tombstone” plays as one of the most serious efforts, a funny decision to make in your song about Wyatt Earp et al. 

“Cowardice” is another strong cut, Angelripper’s vocals delivered with a particularly sinister growl on the chorus and the looser gallop to the rhythm section freshening things up somewhat. I also like closer “Addicted To Abstinence”, which has a heavy Motorhead influence to it. It’s a smart way to end a record for a band quite long in the tooth and returning to the old way of doing things - a reminder of the different gears they have at their disposal when they want. 

Because the unfortunate thing about Code Red is they quite often don’t want to do much of significant interest. I’m no thrash connoisseur but this rarely sounds like the best example of the subgenre, with a lot of the tracks falling flat as they cover similar topics with similar riffs and a similar glibness to their approach. Surprisingly for a band of this nature, they hit a lot harder when they took a more serious approach, and certainly when they strayed further from the tight constraints of thrash.